Welcome to Harry Potter University

I woke up this morning in the same manner as I have for the past three mornings: early. We're talking before-the-alarm-goes-off early. My window shade has been broken for about a week now so the rising sun comes through my window and forces me out of my REM cycles. Granted, at 7 am when I've been waking up the sun either hasn't been up yet or it's been foggy so I really can't complain too much. Today I woke up and decided to try something new. Instead of shutting my eyes for the half hour before my alarm and inevitably drifting into a comfortable semi-sleep that would leave me more tired, I got up. Totally worth it--I've been watching the sunrise over the palm trees and it's beautiful. Everybody both in and out of Lisbon talks about "the light" here. I didn't quite understand it until we went to Porto and got some perspective. Lisbon is always sunny. Sure, there is fog in the morning that weaves between the seven hills, and there have been some rain clouds that have rolled through but these pass and the sun still manages to find its way down to the ground. Even walking through the narrow alleys of Alfama, the oldest part of the city where the buildings are so close you can often reach out on both sides and touch, it is still sunny. Porto was nice but even when the sun shone it wasn't quite like the near-blinding light that floods my new city daily. It's so bright in the afternoon when I'm walking back from class that the light reflects off of the sidewalks to the point where it looks like the sun is shining from underneath and just reflecting on the sky. And go figure, my sunglasses broke and I haven't been able to replace them yet. Pictures alone can't really capture it, but it makes total sense why Lisboners have lanche and sit outside for hours, and why every cafe has at least a few chairs outside, and why store owners stand in their doorways, even when you're inside browsing.

There's nothing like a little natural beauty to pull you out of bed for a long day of school. Since I finally have a few minutes where I don't feel rushed (as if I could ever be coherent about much in the mornings) I'm going to shoot off some headlines of my first week of school. There is always so much going on here that I am falling seriously behind.

• I never mentioned the fact that I have a suitemate. Her name is Tatiana and she is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. For a residencia that doesn't do personality profiles and roommate matching, they managed to get one thing right. I love her. She is extremely friendly and she is a great person to live with--very thoughtful. The other day she brought back brigadeiro, this Brazilian chocolate treat that causes angels to sing when you bite into it. Seriously. We decided that for the first month we will speak English so she can practice but once I learn enough Portuguese to say more than "Hi. It's 4:00. The weather is nice. Where is the bathroom?" we are going to start speaking Portuguese. It's helpful for both of us, since Brazilian Portuguese is a little bit different from the european version. She also brought a blow dryer. I haven't really needed to use it because the wind blows my hair around every morning, but it's nice to know that it's there in case of a real emergency (like getting honey in my hair and having to do an emergency washing...might have happened)
• Yesterday after school, Elsbeth, Annia and I headed over to our pastelaria for an early lanche. One of the owners is an extremely tall man who likes to wink at us. When we walked in a bunch of construction workers were taking a break so it was a) very crowded and b) very crowded with the same men who whistle at us when we walk to school. So our friend Senhor Tall came over and pushed us through the crowd to a table and took our orders and brought it all to us instead of making us go through the wait-at-the-counter ritual. Very sweet. He tried to pull a fast one on me and tell me that my Coke Zero was 5euros, but we learned numbers the other day and common sense is, fortunately, the same in every language. Funny guy, that one is. Probably not as funny as we looked though, writing postcards, eating pastries, and cheering with the construction workers whenever one of the teams playing on TV scored a goal. Successful afternoon lanche.
  
• One of the nice things about Lisbon is that even though there is no SuperTarget, we do have a wide selection of cheap "everything" stores. We call them the Chinese stores because they are all owned by Chinese families, but they sell just about everything you need. And just about everything you don't. For instance, I have bought laundry detergent and soap there. And a dishtowel, a mirror, a rug and a desk lamp. Normal stuff. I have also found, but not purchased, a small martial arts toy that kicks when you push the button, a giant novelty colored pencil that weighs about 3 lbs., a cherub angel lamp that is missing one of its arms, and a Hello Kitty lipgloss set that has been badly translated into English. The stores are quite tiny and the shelves are literally packed full from floor to almost-ceiling. The stuff is cheap--my rug cost 3euro, my mirror 1euro, and even the giant silver candles that looked like wands only cost 1euro. (They might knock the price down since mine and Annia's Harry Potter duel knocked off some of the glitter) We go to the Chinese store for everything. It's a little eclectic (my literature notebook has a picture of a woman on a cell phone and it says "Modern Life!") but we save a lot of euros, especially since we'll be throwing out most of the stuff when we leave. It probably won't even last until December, but we're getting good at becoming creative with things that break. (My mirror has flower petals made out of broken mirror pieces) We also have to be very careful when we go in there because it's easy to buy a lot of stuff you don't need and just invent a use for it later.
  
• We started school this week. All of the CIEE classes are held in the same classroom, which gets a little boring. However, it's impossible to fall asleep in class because my professors are interesting and there's serious construction going on in the classroom below us and next door to us. Have you ever seen that commercial where the couple has just arrived at their hotel and they're trying to talk but every time they open their mouth someone starts drilling very loudly? No? Well, this is what happens in class. The professor starts talking, there's a loud bout of drilling, the professor starts shouting and then eventually has to stop and wait for the drilling to stop. It does, he restarts, and then the drilling starts again. It's hilarious. Probably not for my professors, but for us it's quite comical. How we will learn anything with that racket going on, I'm not sure. But then again, the giant palm trees outside my window are equally distracting...
• Yesterday, the daytime front desk guard, Rosa, whom I adore, tried to engage my help on the phone. She only speaks Portuguese, and she needed to talk to someone in English. She knows I speak English (she knows everybody by face and first and last name and can get you your room key without you even saying anything) so she said "Fala ingles!" and I nodded my head. "Sim" I said. And that was about as far as I got. She started speaking to me slowly in Portuguese and using hand signals to explain what she needed me to say on the phone. What I understood was: "Can you speak english to someone on the phone for me? Doctor, shrug shoulders, cross arms (either cold or angry) Doctor. Please?" Turns out, a girl who doesn't speak Portuguese had needed a doctor so a friend had helped her get one to come to the residecia. The doctor had shown up and waited around for a while and the girl never showed. I was supposed to try calling her in her room and then on her cell phone to let her know the doc was there and mad that she'd been waiting so long. Sadly, I could not translate this. A very nice bilingual student overheard Rosa and me attempting to communicate and offered to help (in Portuguese and then in English, but I understood the Portuguese slash the nice gesture. that's the same in every language too) Rosa is wonderful. I hope to speak enough Portuguese by the end of the semester to have real conversations with her like most of the students in the residencia.
• And now I come to a topic where words alone cannot fully express what I want to convey. We started school this week at the Faculty of Social Sciences, which is basically the liberal arts campus of the New University of Lisbon. And since school started, there are naturally a bunch of freshmen who are also just starting school. And there are a bunch of older classmen who think this is a perfect opportunity to abuse their status as upperclassmen. As we learned Sunday night when a friend of ours woke up all the freshmen in the middle of the night to give them a set of fake rules for dorm life, hazing is not illegal here. Granted, the kind of hazing they do here is not like the hazing that has caused so many lawsuits in the U.S. On Monday when we got to school, we saw large groups of face-painted freshmen being herded around by upperclassmen. At lunch, all of their hands were tied or ziptied together and they had to eat in unison and stop every few minutes to raise their hands, collectively, and start cheering wars with the other groups. Unfortunately, we did not know what was going on and sat right in between two tables full of freshmen, getting caught smack dab in the middle of decibel central. It was like camp color war except that everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves and there weren't any kids crying in a corner because they had to play soccer instead of basketball. This went on all day. And onto the second. And even onto the third day of class. And it extends beyond school. We were downtown the other day and we saw groups of freshmen being paraded around town (to get pastries, no doubt!) with their faces still painted. I don't think that all of the freshmen are involved in this process but I'm not sure. I know that my friend Jose at the dorm was in charge of dorm hazing. They made up these fake rules about curfew (we don't have one; the freshman have one at 10:00), no one can wear anything revealing, so the freshman have been wearing jeans, close-toed shoes and shirts that come all the way up on their neck and at least cover the top part of their arms. According to the fake freshman rules, they're not allowed to invite anybody over or to have anyone in their rooms other than themselves. (Not even same-sex friends) They're allowed to drink but only one drink per week. And they're only allowed to have drugs if they have exactly 10 grams. The whole thing of course was a joke but the last one was particularly funny for the upperclassmen/confused Americans because in the middle of the first night the upperclassmen put bags of powdered sugar under their pillows and then woke them up, accused them of having drugs, pulled them out of bed and then threw them a party and took them out on the town. Like I said--probably not hilarious for the freshmen, and I'm probably a bad person for saying this, but I found it highly amusing. It's not like the hazing at universities at home where they hack away at self-esteem and force students to do really dangerous things like put your feet in ice water and see how long they can stay there without falling off. They don't discriminate against anyone in particular and they treat the whole thing like a giant carnival. And since they are all separated into groups, kind of like orientation, it seems like all the freshmen are really getting to know each other. It actually seems really fun and we asked Jose the other night if we were eligible to take part. We are not freshmen, but we're new to the university. Not enough to qualify. Oh well. We learned our lesson though. We started sitting in a different part of the cantina so we can at least hear something other than screaming. I bet that to anybody not witnessing it live it still sounds awful, but I promise...underneath all the face paint there are smiling faces.
  
• Gulbenkian Gardens. There's a nice park/gardens right near the residencia complete with a performance hall, an outdoor ampitheater, a duck pond, cool shaded gardens etc. It's a very nice space and we go there sometimes after class to soak in the sunshine. It's creepy at night, especially when ducks fly out of the bushes towards your head.
  
• Every day on my way to class I also pass the Spanish embassy. It's an enormous salmon pink building with pretty architecture, but there's a sewer vent right next to it and it always smells positively repulsive. One must hold one's breath to survive to the other side.
  
• Yesterday I almost got run over on the sidewalk by a car that didn't seem to think the road was good enough. I was waiting for the little green man to pop up so I could cross the street and I had to jump out of the way as this car flew up over the curb next to me. Honestly: what is the point of building sidewalks if people are just going to drive all over them?
• Yesterday for my art history class we visited the Teatro Romano, the old roman theater dating back to the days when Lisbon was the roman colony Olisipo. The excavations sit under street level in the Alfama and they eventually had to call off the project because they couldn't knock down people's houses to continue digging. There were lots of giant urns on display that just begged me to climb in them, but being the respectable person that I am, I controlled myself and just took pictures instead. And naturally, being Elena, I didn't see the "no cameras" sign until after I had snapped quite a few. Sorry, museum.
  
• My literature professor sounds a little bit like Sebastian from the Little Mermaid. A little deeper and a lot more Portuguese than French or whatever accent he had in the movie, but the way that he speaks and laughs and his mannerisms all remind me of that little crab.
• There are numerous fresh fruit stands in this city including one on the way to and from school. Today I had a euro in my pocket so I stopped in to get some pears. The whole transaction took less than 30 seconds and I was on my way. So simple. So happy. Pure bliss.
  
• On my way back from class I saw a smart car parked perpendicular between two parallel-parked cars. Ah, Europe.
  

The last thing for this quick-ish update post is also about my first days of school. Last week when we had language classes we saw a few people walking around in what looked like uniforms, complete with capes. This week, with school fully in session, we are literally surrounded by them. Nobody seems to be able to give us a straight explanation of what they are, but from what I've gathered there are competing "houses" here, if you will. They're not exactly fraternities in the American sense but they are these big social groups that have special rules and rivalries. Some of them, I think, have singing groups. But one of the groups wears this signature uniform with button down shirts, ties, coat-tailed tuxedos for the boys, skirts and tights for girls, and capes that are more often than not covered in patches. The cape is as much an accessory as a piece of clothing because it's really too hot here for that, much less long sleeves, tuxedo jackets and tights. Caution, nerd attack coming on: It's a lot like Harry Potter and the different Hogwarts houses. Yes, I said it. And this is how we now refer to the kids in uniforms. Yesterday we were standing in line at the cantina and a student pushed flyers into our hands for a different group called Mata, the anti-Harry Potter group group. And a kid in the Harry Potter uniform was seen holding one of those flyers and another girl tore it out of his hand and started harassing him, I assume, for fraternizing with the enemy.

Dun dun dunnnnn.

Ok. It's not that serious. But it is a big deal and it has made my first week a crazy learning/observing/overwhelming experience. There are so many things going on at once that it's hard to keep track. A lot of the classes don't even start til next week because they don't have professors yet. Muito chaotic. I'm really glad we got some time to settle in and adjust before being thrown into the ring. Looking forward to having a little time to relax and going to the futebol game Saturday when Lisbon's two main clubs will be playing each other.


Yeah, I know. Insane.
It's going to be awesome.