Lost in Translation

In the online class that I'm taking on "Hermeneutics in a Postmodern World" from Pro-Meta in Costa Rica we had to read an article in Portuguese last week. I took one look at it and thought, "Nooooo.... you're kidding, right? I can't read that." But I thought I'd give it the old college try. Do you what? I think that I understand about 90% of the article with some minor help from my friends at wordreference.com! That was pretty amazing to me. I was reading it in Spanish, but the languages are close enough that it's actually not that hard. I just look up a few of the code words I couldn't get (like "no" which means "in").

Have I ever mentioned in my blog that interviews in Portuguese and Italian aren't translated here? The people can understand them well enough to make the translation unneccesary.

We were in the States for about a week (June 27th to July 3rd), and not surprisely I felt out of place. Why? That's hard to say. The overnight flight without sleep didn't help. Nor did four straight days of rain in KC with a case of bronchitis.

But perhaps the funniest experience on the trip was when I picked up our rental car. It was a brand-new Dodge Caliber with about 1,800 miles on it. As I looked at it I thought, "Wow, that's a cool car." I thought that until I sat in the driver's seat. It was pouring, and I couldn't see much because the car was so sporty that its columns blocked my visibility. I started it up and tried to pull from the parking lot I was in to building where Holly and the kids were but I couldn't figure out how to get there. I pulled back in and asked the parking attendent. "No clue," he said. I pulled out again and finally found the entrance to the other parking lot. When I pulled the car up the rain was pouring down even harder, and I couldn't open the trunk. "Is there a button? What do I do? Aarghh..." After about 10 minutes I found the latch to open the trunk.

I missed by 1993 Renault 9 back in Bogota. Sure, it doesn't look like much but at least I can open the trunk and see the roads!