Missing Brazil

I've been missing Brazil, the place I spent 4 months learning and struggling and questioning last fall. I decided to post here an essay I submitted to a study abroad essay contest about my experience:

"Options for Failure and Success when living a 4-month break from your life"

Option one: Spend a whole day understanding nothing.

You cover up your pride with a piece of saran-wrap called humility and admit you don’t understand. You admit the words being forced at you don’t correspond to ideas you can relate to. You accept that you can’t show off your personality via jokes or emphasized quirks. You feel bad because it’s necessary to be understood, otherwise, you feel like you're not really being human that day.

Option two: Congratulate yourself for understanding everything.

At dinner, you follow the conversation close enough to be able to offer your own personal vomit story at the appropriate time. And you know this time the laughter is because your joke translated, not because you sound like a baby learning to form wants into words.

Option three: You can pretend you don’t know anything about language or culture.

Ask about traditions, try out your really embarrassingly out-dated slang, dance on the street with laughing, head-thrown-back disarray, and let a local swing you around. Let your face say, everywhere you go: “I’ve-lost-my-culture-can-I-borrow-yours?”

Option four: Be known and be proud.

Claim and own your foreign-ness. Be just self-effacing enough to be accepted, change some stereotypes about your people when possible. Admit you do have a culture and there are some things about it you think are worth emulating. Disclaim that you don’t speak for everyone from home. Laugh when you’re in a town small enough that the question "at which hostel is the American staying?" works better than an address.

Option five: Embrace the paradox.

Walk through the street, buy a cup of sugar cane juice made in front of you by feeding a stalk of sugar cane through a grinding machine. Enter the high-class mall where security men ride around on scooters. Open your laptop and pick up the wifi. Realize you don’t have to keep an eye on your laptop, because the security guard is doing it for you. Go back outside and have someone make a key for you in five minutes and then buy a bunch of bananas, a pair of hand-made rubber shoes and some spices to clear your sinuses from the same vendor.

Option six: Remember without crying too much.