Critical Thinking - Emily Roth

The language barrier was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated it to be. I did not know any Portuguese except for a few basic words that I had looked up when I arrived in Brazil and that proved to be a big challenge. The thing about Portuguese is that you can read the word but you will most likely mispronounce it therefore causing the locals to be confused and unable to understand what you are trying to say. At first this caused a lot of stress when we go eat somewhere, go shopping, request something from the lobby at our hotel, or any activity that required us to interact with the locals.

The main challenge was all the difficulties we would incur when we went out to eat as a group at dinner time. At these times we usually did not have one of the Brazilian students or our professor with us so we were on our own when it came to communicating with the hostesses and servers at the restaurants. We usually had no problem getting a table but when it came to reading the menu we had to be creative. Google translate came in very handy but it was not always very accurate. Usually the employees would notice our struggle to read the menu and bring out English ones if they had some. They would only have one or two copies usually so it was a timely process to order. Many Brazilian plates are for two or three people so we always had to ask how many each plate fed and then decide among ourselves who was going to split what. Having an odd number was not ideal most of the time. Luckily they understood when we signaled that we were sharing a plate, we definitely learned how to speak with our hands a lot more. Once the check came it was a problem we had to solve and usually one person would take the lead. The check comes as one big bill that we had to split up among ourselves. Ten percent was accounted for in the bill and no tip was left on the table. This was strange for us Americans at first because we have always left tips on the table, but we got used to it. We would pass around the bill and each person would calculate their part and add ten percent. Then the people who were paying with cards would pay first and one of us would collect all the cash. Sometimes we were at restaurants for a long time after we ate because we somehow would miscalculate somewhere or the waiter would be confused. We developed a system and at the end of the trip I was no longer stressed when the check came, we had mastered eating out as a big group in Brazil.

The other challenge was communicating with the receptionists at our hotel. I would try to communicate with just my hands and do my best to understand what they were saying in the beginning but I way overestimated my ability to understand. They were very patient and continued to repeat what they were saying. Once we called it helpless we resulted to google translate. I appreciated their patience and towards the end of the trip I began to pick up on certain words they were saying. We faced many language barriers in Brazil but the Brazilians patience with us and our ability to figure out other solutions made our time in Brazil enjoyable.