Eu não falo português.

We have been in Rio for a week now and are absolutely loving it, except maybe for the language barrier! Mark loves trying to converse with everyone, from the Uber driver to the doorman and our beach friends who get us our umbrellas and chairs every day.  He gets out his phone and uses Google Translate to ask them questions and gets them to dictate their answers back. It is not foolproof... according to Google, Mark had turkey-fish for dinner tonight! You have to hit the button back and forth to switch between the different languages. I don't have the patience for it at all, and since I lost my glasses, I can barely read the itty bitty type on it anyway!! I'm great at smiling and nodding, and I've mastered please and thank you, so I'm good! I do have a whole new appreciation for people who don't understand English, when I just repeat myself slower and louder, hoping they will understand. I have gotten quite creative with my sign language here for sure! 😄 

Our doorman, Andre.

We haven't gotten ourselves into too much trouble yet; however, the subway security guy escorted Mark off the 'women's only' subway car yesterday... who knew that the subway had gendered cars? We hopped on, and a lady tried to tell us that we had to move to the next car, of course, in Portuguese. Mark thought she was trying to tell us that the train wasn't going where we wanted to go. We tried to get off, and she said, "No," and pointed down the subway line. We didn't get it. How did she even know where we were going? Everyone on the train was looking at us; we hadn't noticed that they were all women. Then the security guy showed up, and he started speaking to us in Portuguese; we had no idea what was going on. He pointed to the pink wall with a picture of a woman, and thankfully, Mark put it together. I was too busy panicking about how I was going to bail Mark out of subway jail to think straight. We made our way, a little embarrassed, to the next train car. We later saw this sign between the two cars!

Just to be clear, the sign by the door that the security guy motioned to didn't have any ENGLISH on it like this one!!

We have become friends with the two waiter fellows on the beach, Marcus and Rafael. Rafael speaks a little English, but Marcus doesn't speak any at all. Marcus and Mark have become quite the buddies, chatting away all the time. Marcus hasn't quite figured out that Mark doesn't understand a word that he is saying. It took a couple of days, but now when Marcus comes to chat, he gestures to Mark to get out his phone. It is interesting that even when you say that you don't speak Portuguese here, people just keep talking. I think it is kind of funny that the way you say that you don't speak Portuguese sounds kind of like I NO FOLLOW PORTUGUESE. A lady on the beach today wasn't very happy with vendors getting too close to her towel, at least that is what I 'followed' from her hand gestures. I told her I didn't understand, and she continued anyway... I smiled and nodded. Who knows what I was agreeing to! 

This gives you an idea of just how busy the beach gets!

Tonight at dinner, when the waiter showed us to our table, I went to say thank you (obrigada) and randomly said (asada) the Spanish word for BBQ, (well tecnically ROAST) instead! I'm not even mixing up words in the same language! I suppose I don't have please and thank you mastered after all... smiling and nodding it is from now on!! Thank goodness ketchup is the same in English as Portuguese, because I have no idea what I would have ordered to go with my fries. At least I am not quite as bad as the English-speaking guy who was sitting on the patio. He ended up with 2 huge hamburgers! His eyes were as big as saucers when his order arrived.  He must have smiled and nodded when the waiter tried to explain that he was ordering from the dinner for 2 menu. I was surprised that Mark didn't whip out his phone to show him how to use Google Translate!