Iga from Porto Alegre: The Brazilian kindness knows no limits! (4)

Every new person will embrace you, hug you, kiss you on the cheek - at first sight, no hesitation. It was a little difficult to get used to that at first, because here am I - lifting my hand for a simple handshake and instead of that I'm getting a proper hug and a kiss from a completely unfamiliar person. By this time though I'm all for the hugs, especially when I bump into some handsome folks.

Barely anyone speaks English - but is that really a problem? Actually not at all. By waving, drawing and pointing fingers you can "make conversation" about just anything. I started writing down the names of the places I want to go to and when I'm asking directions I speak Polish - and it still works. Besides - citizens of Porto Alegre are so eager to help that the language-barrier kind of loses any significance. At the bus stop I asked directions to the Beira-Rio - at first the poor woman got a bit confused, "no ingles, no ingles!" but then she started asking people around to find one guy who knew English well enough. On the bus I missed my stop (of course I did...), so I asked a woman next to me in which way I should go now to reach the stadium. So she started yelling in portuguese to stop the whole bus in between stops, hugged me, showed me where to go and pushed me out on the street, so I wouldn't have to walk that far.

Every cafe/bar/restaurant/whatever owner will be more than happy to chat with you, give advice on what to eat, tell what is what and what it's made of etc. Together with Ankit we ended up in Cafe Bodega - a tiny cafe on the same street that my apartment is. Eduardo, the owner, runs it almost all by himself. He prepared great past for us for lunch. We wanted to order so ice-coffee but it wasn't on the menu. Eduardo thought for a while, said "What the hell, I'll try!" and made us the best icy-coffee-smoothie I've ever had in my life.

With Vikas (India) and Daniel (Germany) we visited the Museu de Ciências e Tecnologia - PUCRS, the Museum of Science and Technology in Porto Alegre. A very cool place, similar to the Centrum Nauki Kopernik in Warsaw, where I live. You can touch everything, try and learn how it works, test your own abilities etc.

At first it was a little bit hard because only one item right at the entrance had an English description. Later it got a bit blurry... We tried to understand something from the show about static electricity - eventually I asked a guy next to me if he knew English and could translate for us. All in all we exchanged facebook names, because Lucas wanted to have a friend from Poland.

Luckily, later we managed to find English-speaking guides and it got much more interesting. Before that our trip looked more or less like this:
- Oooh, what is it? How does it work?
*Someone pushes the red button*
- Ooooh, a light!
I bought a child-size Tshirt as a keepsake - because I could fit in! And the print is lovely.

When we got hungry, we went out for a while to a nearby Subway (the museum is right next to the university campus), where once again our English skills were useless - unfortunately simple finger-pointing also didn't work out, so to our difficult food-ordering-process we added Tatiana - a university graduate who stood behind us in the line. We had such a nice lunch together that we ended up spending the whole day together, sightseeing - they have live turtles in parks her! No way, I have to stay here!

Getting to know people in lines in cafes and bars is my new thing now. In another place I was struggling to order a coffee without whipped cream - and again some happy to help Brazilian helped me out, and now we have two more friends, Kelvin and Gustavo, fresh medical students.