Category Archives: Portuguese life

Portuguese, Portuguese life, Student life, Studying at Oxford, Year Abroad

The Year Abroad: A language course in Lisbon

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Hi! I’m Alice, a third year student studying French and Portuguese and I’ve just returned from Lisbon, Portugal. After studying at a university in Lausanne for the first half of my year abroad, I spent 4 months doing a language course in Lisbon and it was a really good, though at times challenging, experience. Now that my year abroad is over, I’ve had time to reflect on my experiences in different countries and think about what I would do differently if I were to do it again. 

As I enrolled as a student at the Université de Lausanne for the first part of my year abroad, I wanted to try something different whilst in Lisbon. A language course at the Universidade de Lisboa with the Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa seemed like a good option as I had already completed a month-long course with the same language school a few years ago, and so I knew the general structure of their courses. However, I made my decision quite late as I had been considering different options as well as different Portuguese cities; this made it a little stressful, especially in terms of finding accommodation at quite late notice, but I’ve also realised that it’s quite common for year abroad students not to have concrete plans for the whole year at the beginning and for plans to change.

I’m really pleased with my decision to go to Lisbon because, although I was apprehensive about living in a much bigger city than I am used to and my concern about Lisbon being overrun with tourists, I ended up enjoying exploring different parts of the city and finding some really nice spots.

My accommodation was in quite a central location and I used the metro every day to get to and from my language classes, so I decided to get a ‘navegante’ travel card which was a little time-consuming to get initially but was definitely worth the hassle; this is a rechargeable card that works on the metro, buses, trams and ferries, and most locals have one. This meant that I paid a monthly amount and then had access to all areas of metropolitan Lisbon, and so I made the most of this by visiting different parts of the city. As well as visiting some of the main tourist hotspots (such as the Sé cathedral and the nearby town of Sintra), I also found some hidden gems around the city. For example, my favourite place to visit was the Gulbenkian, a series of museums situated in a park with lots of wildlife and quite near to my accommodation, so it was a lovely place to go for a walk. I also really enjoyed exploring the museums in Lisbon – on the first Sunday of every month several museums offer free entry between certain hours, including the MAAT museum. I also particularly enjoyed visiting the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, and the Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora.

I had the afternoons and weekends free to explore the city and beyond, and on weekday mornings I studied for 4 hours at the language school. I found it helpful that the classes focused on a variety of topics, so we not only had grammar and writing lessons but also Portuguese history classes, Portuguese art and culture classes, and literary reading lessons. I found this to be a good structure as we studied aspects of Portuguese culture that I hadn’t explored before. Whilst I would have preferred more dedicated speaking classes, my spoken Portuguese still improved over the 4 months as we did several presentations in class, and I got to know my course mates.

Whilst I was initially concerned that I might speak English with my fellow students, in fact we spoke Portuguese together in and outside of classes, as our common language was Portuguese. This helped improve my language skills further and I also became friends with a few of them, meeting up outside of classes for coffee and also to go to the theatre. It was really fun going to see a Portuguese theatre production even though it was tricky to understand everything the actors were saying. However, it was a valuable experience and listening to Portuguese in a different setting was useful because I was still able to follow the plot.

I really enjoyed both parts of my year abroad and studying at university and doing a language course were positive experiences; I was able to improve my language skills and form new friendships in both cities, gaining confidence over the year and going further out of my comfort zone. There were of course challenges involved in the year abroad, but I really value the experiences I had and finding solutions made me feel more confident in exploring new places.

Events and Competitions, Film, Latin America, Portuguese, Portuguese life

Brazil Week

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This week’s blog post was written by Franklin, a second-year student in French and Portuguese from scratch. Here, Franklin tells us about this year’s ‘Brazil Week’…

In Week Six of Hilary Term every year, the Portuguese Sub-faculty organises ‘Brazil Week’, a series of free events – talks, performances and film screenings, to name just a few – which are open to members of the University and local community. The aim: to raise awareness of the richness and diversity of Brazilian culture. Events, though organised from within the Modern Languages Faculty, are designed to underline the wide variety of disciplines in which aspects of Brazil and Brazilian life are being researched: politics, history, theology, anthropology and sociology, for example. Each year promises to be an engaging and exciting week, and this year’s Brazil Week – whose theme was ‘Brazil Now’, in light of the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency – was no exception.

The week began with a focus on film. On Monday evening, St Peter’s – one of the more than 30 colleges that comprise the University – hosted a screening of Flávia Castro’s Deslembro, a film that explores themes of identity and memory through the lens of the experiences of its teenage protagonist, Joana. The following day, we welcomed Dr Maite Conde, Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Cambridge University, who spoke about her recently published book, Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil. Maite’s book discusses the reception of cinema in Brazil in the early twentieth century and explores how early films sought to represent cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, in a similar vein to European capital cities, notably Paris, and her talk was particularly insightful for final year students studying Brazilian cinema.

Photo by Davi Costa on Unsplash

Later on Tuesday, in what was perhaps the standout event of the week, the Brazilian writer and activist Anderson França gave a talk which touched on his 2017 collection of crônicas, Rio em Shamas (or ‘Rio in Flames’). Attended by students and staff of the University and members of the Portuguese and Brazilian communities in Oxford, Anderson’s talk highlighted the reality of growing up in Rio de Janeiro, how tourists don’t see the real Rio, and the precariousness of the political situation in Brazil.

A theatre workshop for students with the actor and director Almiro Andrade on Wednesday morning marked the halfway point. In it students were able to discuss ways of staging two canonical Brazilian plays, Auto da Compadecida and Morte e vida severina, both of which are studied in first year. Later that day, St Peter’s hosted a well-attended seminar, organised by postgraduate Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, for all those doing research into aspects of Brazil. Thursday saw the University’s Latin America Centre host Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke and Peter Burke, who delivered a lecture on the influential Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work all Portuguese undergraduates come across at some stage in their studies, and, just as it started, the week drew to a close focussing on cinema, with a roundtable, chaired by Professor Claire Williams, involving three specialists in Brazilian cinema.

Overall, the week was a great success, spotlighting the vitality and diversity of Brazilian culture and showcasing the breadth of research focussed on Brazil being carried out at Oxford. Brazil Week is one of many opportunities that students of Portuguese can get involved with to expand their knowledge of the Portuguese-speaking world and be introduced to cutting-edge research. Other events that the Sub-faculty organise include the Research Seminar, which regularly welcomes academics from around the world to speak about their latest work. This year, we have had talks entitled ‘Lima Barreto: An Afro-Brazilian Crusader’, ‘Memórias íntimas marcas: post-war transnational dialogues in Angolan art’ and ‘Critical futurities and queer-disabled existence in Mozambican, Ugandan and Zimbabwean political cultures’ amongst many more, reflecting the global nature of Portuguese as a language and the richness and vibrancy of the cultures of the Lusophone world.

 

Portuguese life

A Flavour of Portugal

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by Clare Tierney, a second-year undergraduate in French and Portuguese at St John’s College

One of the most exciting parts of learning an ab initio language (learning a language from scratch) is the ab initio culture, I came to realise. Since starting Portuguese at Oxford in October 2016, I have delved into literature from the last 500 years, works of art, film, but, perhaps most important to me personally has been the food and drink. Much to my recently-gained chagrin, Portuguese cuisine is a bit of an unknown quantity in Britain. Nando’s could speak for Portugal, though few diners are actually aware of its Luso heritage, leaving Spain’s chorizos to single-handedly sum up food on the Iberian peninsula. But Portugal can most certainly hold its own when it comes to wining and dining.

The faculty wasted no time in acquainting us with Portuguese wine, putting on a tasting of both Portuguese and Brazilian, red and white during our pre-sessional course, which is an intensive introduction to the language. Here we discovered vinho verde. Relatively uncommon in England, this lightly sparkling white is delightful, and trips to Lisbon and Porto this past summer confirmed my positive opinion. None of the binge drinking nonsense in a restaurante tradicional: it’s 6€ a bottle when dining in, which is inviting excitable young Brits like us to drink with food, i.e. responsibly! Then we come to the Sagres beer, which is affiliated with the Lisbon team Benfica, and is both light and flavourful. What’s more, it is named after the coastal promontory on which Henry the Navigator had a chapel built in 1459. At the geographical extremity of their homeland, the discoverers would pray for safety on their voyages to map the world. Nothing could be more Portuguese than this, uniting sailing the seas, beer and football in a single product.

So what about food? The ingenuity of persecuted Jews during the Inquisition has stayed part of the country’s gastronomy in the form of alheira: a deep-fried medley of meats shaped, as sausages, to resemble their Christian oppressors’ pork equivalent. The pastel de nata or custard tart was also the invention of the religious community, though in this case it was the Catholic monks’ means of generating income. From their humble origin in 1837, they were named one of the ‘Seven Gastronomic Marvels of Portugal’ in 2011. The alheira sausage was too named, along with paella’s lesser known (but clearly award-winning) sibling arroz de marisco (the self-explanatory seafood rice). And this is still neglecting the expertly made coffee at 60 cents a cup in the centre of the capital city, not to mention the infinite list of of beans and fish with their equally infinite lists of accompanying seasonings and cooking methods ranging from garlic and on the grill, to frying in olive oil. A year abroad full of omega-3, caffeine and theological heritage awaits me and my stomach!