February and March 2023 were full of spring flowers with temps in the 60s, 50s at night. Oh, I mean 15-20 degrees C by day, and above 10ºC at night.
We’re retraining ourselves to think Celsius for oven temps and weather. It’s not too hard since 5 degrees Celsius is very approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The correspondence gets misaligned by the time we’re up to 35 degrees. Today, in August, we’re in a heat wave and it’s 35 C (95 deg F), maybe even higher. My brain just knows I’d prefer temperatures below 30 C. In the shade, 30 C is OK, but even then I’ll stay out of the hot sun.
Metric measurements require a lot of translation. We’re used to feet and inches to estimate all kinds of things. Grams and kilograms, not ounces and pounds. Milliliters and liters, not fluid ounces and cups. We brought our imperial measuring cups so familiar recipes will be easy. I like kilometers versus miles when I’m walking though. I can imagine I did more work with the higher number.
Even lightbulbs are a challenge. There are codes for different types of bases, as well as translating LED watts to old incandescent watts (which back in U.S. we had to do already), and remembering to pay attention to the color temperature. 5000K is a good neutral light color. We’ve already got some mismatched light temperatures in our ceiling fixtures. The different colored shadows are charming, I say.
We have to reinterpret the nutrition information on food packages. I always like to know how much sugar and calcium is in my breakfast food. We’ve all gotten used to grams on the labels. But, quantities of carbs, sugar, calories, and calcium are given per 100 grams, and only sometimes per serving. Some packages are in Spanish and others are in French. Some list ingredients in four or five languages. When I’m done, sometimes I’m not even aware of which language I was reading. It doesn’t mean I’m fluent in anything, and it certainly doesn’t translate to fluency in speaking and especially in listening.
Hearing and understanding people speaking Portuguese is hard. The words all munge together and there isn’t time to both figure out what the words are and then figure out what they mean and how they combine into sentences. To help with listening to regular spoken Portuguese, I’m trying some movies with the captions set to Portuguese too. That might help with recognizing the spoken words.
We’re listening to lots of Portuguese pronunciation videos because the language can be a tongue twister. In a year’s time, I hope I can still speak English! I find myself pronouncing other languages with the sh sound for “s”, which is in so many Portuguese words.
Then there’s learning the geography of Portugal, which is fun. I’ve always loved maps. It also means finding many places to put on our travel list.