Ana Margarida

I don’t have a picture of Ana Margarida yet, but I’ll post one when I get one. She’s my teacher and she’s so awesome. One of the requirements of the scholarship from the Department of Education that I got was that I attend 140 hours of language classes this summer. The program I’m attending is only 80 hours long and begins in July. To complete the 140 hours requirement I arranged to take 60 hours of private lessons from the university. The university charges 27 euros an hour for the lessons which is far more than a normal person would ever want to pay, but the Department of Education agreed to pay it.

While I was worried about finding a place to live in Portugal and not being able to talk to people, the thing that worried me the most was spending 60 hours one on one with someone that I didn’t like. When I first met Ana Margarida I was immediately put at ease. Not only is she kind and funny, but she is a fantastic language teacher. I know lots of language teachers and I would say that she’s just as good as a Leigh Cherry or a Rob Martinsen which is really saying something. We do a lot of different activities to break up the day and it’s a blast. We start out every class with me telling her what I did the previous day and asking questions about things that I didn’t understand. Like, “Is it normal for my landlady’s mom to do my laundry?” or, “My waiter didn’t bring me my check for 40 minutes. What’s up with that?” We usually end up chatting and laughing for the first 30 minutes of class before we get to any real work.

On the first day of class I was a little jetlagged and started to get really tired after three hours of class. She asked me if I wanted to end early and I did. I said, “I’m sorry, but five hours is just such a long time,” and she said simply, “Yes it is.” The next day I told her how relieved I was when I met her because she was so fun and such a good teacher. She confessed that she was relieved when she met me, too. You see, she didn’t realize that I had a scholarship that was paying for the private lessons. She thought I was some uppity American that was willing to pay 27 euros an hour for private lessons and she was worried that I would complain if we didn’t have five hours of perfect language instruction. She was incredibly relieved to learn that I didn’t want to be there for five hours either and that I was just filling a requirement and we’re both glad to have a laidback atmosphere. So since we have to be together for five hours a day, we’re going to start sightseeing together next week and I’m super-pumped. I’m so glad she’s my teacher.

I really enjoy how we just chat in Portuguese every day. I’ve shown her pictures of my family and she’s shown me pictures of hers. On the second day of class we were talking about how I learned Spanish and I told her that I was a missionary in Mexico. She was surprised to learn I was Mormon because she thought Mormons lived in isolated communities without electricity and wore bonnets. She’d never met a Mormon before and didn’t even know that there were Mormons in Portugal. She asked me what the Book of Mormon was and, in Portuguese, I explained how it was written during the same time as the Bible, but in the Americas, how it was written on gold paper, how Moroni buried it in the ground and Joseph Smith took it out of the ground and rewrote it in English (those are the actual words I used because I didn’t know words like “plates” and “translate”). My vocabulary was really limited and it took so much effort to say it. Ana could tell that it had been difficult for me to explain everything in Portuguese and when I was finished we looked at each other and in unison we each took a deep breath and leaned back into our chairs.

Reflecting on this experience, I realized just how long it’s been since I’ve told someone about the Book of Mormon and how much I miss doing that. And I left out so many important details like Christ’s visit to the America’s and the First Vision and just the fact that the Book of Mormon has changed my life. I’ve spent the last two years at BYU where I go most days without ever even seeing someone who isn’t LDS. And now here I am, on the other side of the world, and my only friend is someone who’s never met a Mormon before. I’m glad to be here and I’m glad to be in a place where I’m reminded that I don’t live my religion just because everyone else is, but because I want to. I hope I get the opportunity to explain to Ana the important parts that I left out of the Book of Mormon because I didn’t do the book justice. And I also want to explain the Joseph Smith story because if she’s heard of Joseph Smith, she’s probably just heard a lot of incorrect and negative information. As much as I love the safety of BYU, I love being able to teach people, too and I’ve missed that.

Here’s a story that I had to write for class. I had to use some vocabulary words (try and guess which ones). And, of course, the original version is in Portuguese. As I read the story to Ana there were a few times that we were laughing so hard that I had to stop reading. That’s how we spend most of class—laughing.

Once upon a time a girl wanted to be the Queen of Spain. The problem was that she was from Portugal so she couldn’t be the Queen of Spain unless she married the Prince of Spain. She didn’t like him very much because he was ugly and a bookworm. But she had a goal so it was all good. She went and talked with the Prince and he liked her and asked her to marry him. She thought and realized that he was so ugly that she couldn’t marry him. But she didn’t want to give up on her goal so she said to him, “Wait one minute,” and she went outside. She went looking for a miracle. She found a beehive and asked, “Is there anyone there that can give me a miracle?” but no one responded. Then she ran into an anthill and asked the same question. An ant came out and said to her, “I can grant wishes.” She replied, “Very good, magic ant. I want you to make me blind so that I never have to look at the Prince.” And so it was and she never looked at the Prince again, but she married him and they lived happily ever after.

And lastly, here of some pictures of the places I studied today. Since it was Saturday I went all over the city and read for an hour and then went to a new place. The first picture is my failed attempt to stage a picture. I doubt I'm the first person to forget to set the timer on my camera.

Fitting in

I felt very out of place when I first got to Lisbon, but now that I’ve been here for a few days I’m starting to feel more like I fit in. However, I can’t escape the fact that I stick out like a sore thumb. I was talking with Margarida, my teacher, today saying that I was getting frustrated with so many random people walking up to me and speaking to me in English. Do I look so American that people can tell my nationality just by looking at me? Apparently I do. I told Margarida that I’ve seen people here just as tall as me, just as white as me, with my same hair color, and with blue eyes. She responded, “Yes, Benjamin, there are tall people in Portugal, and fair skinned people in Portugal, and people with brown hair in Portugal, and people with blue eyes in Portugal, but you’re the ONLY person in the whole country that has all four traits together.” I’ve been paying more attention and she appears to be correct.

Lately when I’ve looked at myself in the mirror I’ve thought, “Whoa, I am tall and my limbs are so unnaturally long.” I’ve gotten so used to seeing mostly short people that seeing a tall person like myself reminds me of looking at giraffe. I remember when I was on my mission and I was getting ready in the morning one day and noticed how blue my eyes were. I was so used to seeing dark brown eyes that seeing how blue my own eyes were was kind of surprising.

Yesterday I finally got my metro pass and I’ve been using the metro like crazy now that I don’t have to pay for each individual ride. I’ve gotten off at random stations and walked around just to see a different part of the city. It’s particularly fun because Lisbon is such a diverse city that I’ll walk out of the metro at one station and I’ll be at a super-modern mall and at another station I’ll be surrounded by crumbling buildings older than the US. It’s fun to be able to do that. But this is the main reason I like my metro pass—it makes me feel like I fit it. Almost everyone has a metro pass and people typically keep them in their wallets. Instead of removing the pass from their wallets, they just slide their entire wallets across the scanner to get on the metro. I do the same thing. It may sound weird, but it makes me feel like I fit in.


Even though I like my apartment, I don’t spend much time there during the day. The weather has been so nice that I usually just go to a random park to read for a few hours. When I get, I eat. When I get thirsty, I buy some water. When I get tired, I go home. I really do love all the time I have to read here and it’s so refreshing to read for fun.


I love my Kindle so much!


Crumbling buildings.




I was going to wait for that lady to walk out of the shot before I took the picture, but my impatience got the better of me.




This picture is just to prove that I'm actually in Portugal.

A Home for Ben

I found a place to live! And I did it on my second day in Lisbon, too. I live with three students: two from Portugal and one from Cameroon. We each have our own rooms and I haven’t seen much of my roommates because they mostly just hang out in their rooms. Hopefully we’ll become friends soon because I don’t want to spend my summer alone. The apartment is obviously very old, but I like the character it has. My landlady was super-worried that I’d be too long for my bed. I fit okay.


Margarida, my landlady, is so nice and I can understand her pretty well which is great because Portuguese is much harder than I had anticipated. Unfortunately, I’m still a little slow and don’t always get her jokes. She was showing me how to lock my bedroom door and apologized profusely because to lock it, you have to pull the door pretty hard. As she was showing me how to lock it she said, “This happens to new doors.” I just responded with an “uh huh,” but then realized that she had made a joke and pretty funny one at that considering the fact that my door is probably older than Mao Zedong. The two big keys are to my bedroom door and the front door. I didn’t know that such big keys still existed in places outside of Narnia.


My house has some other quirks. For example, I used the toilet for the first time last night and was going to flush, of course, but I couldn’t find the handle. It was nowhere to be found. I examined the entire area around the toilet, but still, no handle. I was about to timidly ask one of my roommates for help when I realized that about four feet from the toilet there was a water tank over the bathroom mirror. There was a chain dangling from the tank and when I pulled it – whoosh! For the first time the sound of toilet flushing signaled my success.

Overall, I love my apartment. I have a hamper that looks like a penguin, a chair in my room that promotes good posture instead of being comfortable, and a mirror that’s high enough on the wall for me to see my face. I think the placement of the mirror in my room is the weirdest thing since the Portuguese are typically small and there’s no way they’d be able to see themselves in that mirror. I’m enjoying being here and the “what the heck have I done?” and the “why did I think going to Europe alone would be fun?” feelings have gone and I’m pumped to settle in and feel more at home here.


P.S. I was going to upload more pictures, but the internet is my house is so slow (like, dial-up slow).

Take an item, leave an item

My good friend Jordan drove down from Salt Lake for one last visit before I head off to Portugal. We went to this cool art exhibit at the HFAC where you take one of the items on display and replace it with an item of equal value. That’s the idea, but people apparently are a little cheap since some of the items there now are candy wrappers, pieces of paper, and half used bottle of Pepto Bismol. We took my old license plate.



We exchanged the license plate for a VHS that didn’t have a label. We took it over to the library to watch it and Jordan noticed some posters that she designed a few years ago. They’re pretty faded, but they’re still there.



We had no idea what was on the video.



When we played it, we discovered that it was a tape of a boy asking a girl to prom. It was kind of weird and he did a lot of random impressions. I don’t know if Tyler and Kimberly went to the dance together, but I’m assuming that they’re not together now since Kimberly gave the tape away.



With the mystery of the unlabeled VHS solved, we headed back to the exhibit and traded the VHS for a slightly tacky hair clip that Jordan wore with style.



We then went to Starbucks to use a $10 gift card that I’ve had for five years. I would have used it sooner, but I didn't know of any Starbucks in Utah Valley. It turns out there's one in Orem. While the hot chocolate and pumpkin bread were delicious, I don’t think they were worth $10.

Portuguese, Please

As a language teacher, I often warn my students that they will say something embarrassing without meaning it. Everyone does it, everyone feels silly, you just accept it, don’t make the same mistake twice, and move one. I’m going to Portugal in five days and I have accepted the fact that I’ll make a few blunders while I’m learning Portuguese. However, I didn’t expect that I would make a fool of myself even before leaving the US.

I’ve been in contact with the program secretary, Teresa, for a few months now. Teresa recently put me in contact with Margarida who will be tutoring me for three weeks in Portugal. Margarida told me that Teresa would be reserving a classroom for our lessons, but she wasn’t sure if Teresa had yet. I emailed Teresa this morning and asked her if she had reserved a room for Margarida and me. And that was my blunder.

You see, I used word “quarto” which I thought meant “room,” as in an enclosed space with four walls, but actually only means “bedroom.” The word I should have used was “aula” which means classroom. I basically asked the secretary if she had reserved a bedroom for Margarida and me. Teresa is a funny woman and she wrote back, “I haven’t reserved a bedroom for you, but I have reserved a classroom ;)” The winky smile eased my embarrassment and made me glad that Teresa knew I had made an honest mistake and wasn’t some American creeper. I’m sure I’ll embarrass myself much more frequently when I’m actually in Portugal.

Saturday Night Shopping

I don’t enjoy shopping. When I shop for clothes I’m never sure what looks good or what’s in style. Grocery shopping is just as bad since I don’t cook much and I’m never sure what to buy. I went grocery shopping by myself on Saturday night which makes things even worse. I inevitably run into people I know and end up saying things like, “Hi, former roommate, I’m glad you’re shopping with your wife while I buy frozen pizzas alone,” or, “Hi, current student, it sure looks like you’re having fun on your date. Can I squeeze by you? You’re standing in front of the pre-shredded cheese.”

This particular trip to the supermarket wasn’t so bad. I stopped there on my way home from a friend’s house and needed to use the bathroom. As I walked into the bathroom at Macy’s I was expecting a public restroom as clean as the ones at BYU, but was instantly disappointed when I walked into a tiled room that reeked of air freshener and other less-fresh odors. As I walked up to the sink to wash my hands I was startled by my appearance. You see, I have once again moved into an apartment where I am too tall to see the majority of my head in the bathroom mirror. I got a haircut on Friday morning, but hadn’t seen the top of my head since then and had forgotten that I’d gotten a haircut. It’s kind of startling to realize that your hair is shorter than expected while standing in a stinky public restroom.

My next moment of fright came from the reality of inflation. Easter is just down the road and so the grocery stores have started selling my favorite Easter candy – Cadbury Cream Eggs. I remember when I was a kid I could by five eggs for a dollar and I did (and then promptly ate too much and felt sick). Macy’s was selling the delicious chocolate eggs for 59 cents apiece. Wow, the changes that occur in 20 years. The British get to eat those delectable treats year round and we only get them for a few months and have to pay 59 cents for a shell of chocolate filled with sugary cream. It got worse. I turned down the frozen food aisle and glanced at the price of the generic brand frozen waffles. A box of waffles that I used to pay 89 cents for now costs $1.99. And that’s the generic brand!

My trip to the grocery store ended pleasantly enough. The checker and I briefly discussed the weather, whether or not I’d found everything alright, the kind of bag I wanted my groceries to be placed in, and how terrible it was that she had to work until midnight at which point I left with my items. When I got home I watched a rerun of The Office while eating a bowl of Reese’s Puffs that only cost me $2.50 (plus tax). All in all it was a successful trip and I now have milk for my cereal.

I'll be the nose, you be the hand

I love teaching and feel that I’m good at it. I’ve had jobs before that I didn’t feel like I did well and instead of leaving work feeling invigorated I left feeling stressed and discouraged. Luckily, that isn’t the case for my current job – usually.

As an intermediate Spanish teacher I mostly help my students develop communicative competence (i.e. speaking, listening, and writing). However, for the last few weeks of the semester my class is reading a play called “La dama del alba.” It’s a great story, but I have no idea how to teach literature. I have a teaching guide that goes through the points that I’m supposed to cover, but even with that I run out of things for us to discuss. A few days ago I ended class ten minutes early because I didn’t have anything else to say.

To make my life just a little more difficult there is going to be a Christmas fiesta next week for a bunch of the Spanish classes and each class is going to sing a Christmas carol in Spanish. I didn’t know any Spanish carols so I asked for suggestions and a bunch of people recommended “Fum, fum, fum.” I listened to it on Youtube and liked it and told my class that we’d be singing it. However, when we tried to sing it in class it was surprisingly fast and hard to sing. Most of my students didn’t want to sing it and I was at a loss for what to do.

That night I tried to figure out the song on my own, but I couldn’t. The timing was weird and I couldn’t figure it out. Not only could I not sing the song, but I had no idea how to teach a song to my class. I didn’t feel like I could do it and that stressed me out and frustrated me. Since I didn’t know what to do I decided to do nothing. I thought to myself, “I have a class full of people that are musically talented; they don’t need me to teach them.”

When I got to class the next day I passed out the sheet music to the song and asked who knew how to lead a choir. Two girls raised their hands and I said, “Great! You’re gonna teach this song to the class.” They looked a little surprised, but they came to the front of the class and within ten minutes had the class singing beautifully. Seriously, it sounded so good. We also rolled in a piano and someone brought their violin and it all flowed together. I couldn’t believe it. I had done nothing to help them sing (except for interrupting the music directors occasionally to make witty comments), but I was so proud of them all.

This experience reminded me of 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul teaches that each member of the body is important. The foot isn’t more important than the eye or the eye more important than the ear, but everyone is needed for the body to function properly. Those girls couldn’t have taught the class grammar and I couldn’t teach the class music, but together we ended up with a Spanish choir. There are a lot of things that I can’t do and I’m very grateful for the many people that do those things well because without you I couldn’t experience them. It’s nice to know that when we work together we end up with a spectacular result.

As usual I think my students have taught me more than I’ve taught them. Thank you, students. I’ll be the nose and you can be the rest.