Comparative cultures: Portugal Section I: Concrete Experience

I have been attracted to Portugal for most of my life, because I have some Portuguese ancestry. I was curious, for example, about how much of the culture of family has been influenced by this background, and what elements. But as I got older I also started just to take an interest in the country in general. I would cheer for Portugal at the World Cup and things like that, for example, when I don’t know if I had any reason to. I started to become quite curious about this place that was on one hand a fairly normal Western country that seemed like it would be familiar in many respects to my own life, but on the other hand also seemed to be quite a bit different – slower pace of life, high family orientation, less work-obsessed than one might normally find in America. So I started to think a bit more about the differences between Portugal and America, and to that meant increasing my exposure to Portugal a bit more.

I know that some of the food my mother made growing up was Portuguese, or at least Portuguese adapted for the United States, so that was probably my first real exposure to the culture directly. But over time I started to research Portuguese music on the Internet and as I started to think about going there, I took it upon myself to track down some other media, and start learning the language. That part was actually a bit more challenging because a lot of times you end up learning Brazilian Portuguese, which is different from regular, but obviously is spoken by more people.

Of course, the final step for me was to do the immersion, with a trip there. The first thing for me was the trip planning, and that alone gave me the opportunity to accelerate my learning. Just starting with whatever information was online about the main sites, and trying to find things I would specifically find to be interesting, like heritage sites, religious sites, learning about the food, the beaches, the cities, and the history. All of those things came into my view in a much deeper way than I had learned before. I was still seeking out the things that I felt were going to interest me the most, but I had expanded my knowledge beyond the lowest-hanging fruit.

Then it was time to go to Portugal, and I had planned to spend three weeks there over the summer, seeing different parts of the country. For me that was a very visceral experience. When I first arrived I was swept away of course. The things I’d prepared and learned ahead of time were of course things that I recognized right away, but it’s one thing to read about some food and another to eat it. So experience just gave me a lot of richness, and added to the details that were already etched in my mind. I was excited and overwhelmed at the same time, but the first weeks I was in Lisboa and Oporto, and doing those cities made my experience easy. I was in hostels with other foreigners, so I was basically about to go to a place at the end of the day and process my experience a bit. I kept a journal in order to gather my thoughts on what I was experiencing. But interestingly, that first week, for all its euphoria, ended up being the least Portuguese of my experiences. What happened was that I was keeping one foot solidly in my roots. I was too intimidated to speak the language because I immediately recognized that I wasn’t...

I hung out with other tourists, and did touristy things. It was an amazing time but after about a week I started to realize that my interactions were more superficial than I was expecting, and that was a problem.
So I sought out deeper experiences and the second week was easily the most difficult. I went into the mountains and then headed south, so I spent a lot of time in places with few tourists. I was forced to struggle with the language, rather than reverting to English. I was in places where I couldn’t just spend my evenings hanging out with other tourists. This was a much more immersive component of my trip and by the time I got to my third week I think I started to have my sea legs and really became much more directly engaged with Portuguese people and culture, not in the idealized sense I’d learned before the trip but in the real sense as those things are today.

Section II: Observations and Reflections

One of the first things that stands out about Portuguese culture is that it is this blend of old and new, but has a lot of the old. A city like Lisboa can seem modern in places but even...…respects, especially in rural areas, life seems unchanged almost for centuries.

The sense of place in the world is something that differentiates Portugal from the US. Portgual is a former colonial power, and this gives them a sense of pride as to their contributions to the world. They understand that their culture and language extend far beyond their boundaries, yet they realize that they are no longer a world power, so this is quite different from the US. There are no expectations of greatness for the Portuguese people in that sense, they don’t want to be leaders of the world, and in fact they seem okay with their current position in the world, except of course when they are compared with Spain, in which case they might take a bit of offense.

Section IV: Application to New Situations

There’s two things I want to do with this body of knowledge. The first is to get to know the culture more. I think I have more language skills now, but I also have a much greater cultural fluency. This cultural fluency has actually grown since I’ve returned to America, because I’ve been able to reflect on my experiences and assimilate some of that knowledge. So for me, it is important to build on the work that I’ve done and really make my knowledge of Portugal and its culture a bigger part of my own world, not just some thing I did when I was younger. I want to really build a lifelong connection to this place and to this part of my background.

The other thing for me is that I’d like to take the ways that I learned about Portuguese culture and apply them to other cultures that I have an interest in. If I want to learn about French culture, or Argentinian or Japanese, or wherever, I feel that I have a pretty good sense now of how that learning journey will look. I know the starting points, and I know what to expect when I do get to the point where I can travel to get the immersive experience. I think that the immersive experience is essential to learning about a culture but I also know now how best I can get that experience. So I want to take the skills that I have acquired in learning about a new culture and use those to learn about other cultures around the world, especially some of the other ones in which I have an interest.…