To punch, or not to punch?

Well, I've met some interesting characters lately. Vere, being the generous soul that she is, offered to let two French travelers that she'd met on a bus a few weeks before come stay at her house. I love couch surfing and was obviously on-board with the whole idea. I hadn't woken up yet that morning when they rang the doorbell and was just getting out of bed, as they were coming up the stairs. As they walked in, Vere said, "This is Shannon. She's from the U.S." The French guy, sounding burdened, responded immediately with "Oh. So we're speaking English then." I was slightly offended (even though that's a fair assumption for the majority of Americans) and answered that we could speak Spanish or Portuguese (the only other possible options for he and Vere) if they wanted and that I'd be able to keep up. It turned out, though, that the French girl only speaks French and English so it was because of her that we needed to speak English. That was no problem, of course, but I was a little annoyed by the fact that this dude had tried to blame the fact that we only had English as a common language on me. If I were a monolingual American, I would've had to just accept the condescension in his tone and assume it really was my fault that we only had one common language.

Then later, as we sat around having breakfast together, we started discussing different aspects of Brazilian culture (traffic, racism, social classes, attitudes toward traveling, etc...) and comparing them to our home countries of France, Mexico and the U.S., as well as the many other countries that the four of us had traveled to. I went off on a bit of a tangent explaining realities in the U.S., which I constantly feel like I have to do in order to explain to the world that average life there is not necessarily what we portray on TV, through music and in Hollywood movies, nor is it the perfect dream land we try to tell the world it is. Just like Americans have misconceptions about other countries before going there, people in other countries have misconceptions about the U.S. before going. Every country in the world is great but I like to remove other people's "the grass is always greener" ideas when possible since I've been in multiple yards.

Anyway, after getting all of that out in the open, I told them that I so appreciated conversations like this because I can't have them when I go 'home' to the U.S. They didn't understand, of course, because people in their countries travel more than people in the U.S. (I am again, obviously, excluding "traveling" to resort-type places...I mean staying in real homes, among the average people, learning about the actual life and culture there). They thought it was crazy when I said that the majority of the people in my family have never really traveled so I, therefore, can't talk to them about what it's like to live in different healthcare systems, work in different education systems, live with different traffic and social laws, live under different taxation systems and so on. French people travel a lot more than Americans so, when these guys go home, they can freely discuss what they've seen and done; the people around them not only understand but can add to it with their own ideas and experiences. It makes for amazing cross-cultural conversation. However...when I said all this, they yelled something along the lines of "What are you talking about?? Cross-cultural?! You've been talking about the U.S. for the past hour!" 'Hour' was certainly an exaggeration but my tangent had led to them making a joke about how even this conversation with an American was imperialistic...but I guess I brought that on myself. In trying to take away from certain U.S. stereotypes, I somewhat proved another one. Oops. Regardless, the conversation was awesome (it was cross-cultural) and it was my favorite part of the few days that we all go to spend together.


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A few days later, I was coming home from the grocery store and Vere's next-door-neighbor, an old dude from Belgium, heard me unlocking our door and said he was coming out to chat. Vere had introduced me to him when I first got here because he teaches English and she thought he might have advice for me on getting students. That very first conversation, he told me (with no fewer than a dozen grammatical errors) that he teaches advanced English to government workers and makes a lot of money doing so. We hadn't talked since and I wasn't going to ask him for help because he clearly doesn't speak English very well and, even if potential Brazilian students don't know that, I don't want him to be my reference. *I also want to explain: his grammatical problems are not the ones that we, native speakers, commonly use and therefore accept on some level. He was unsuccessfully trying to sound extremely intellectual by using words like "whom" but using them incorrectly.

Anyway, he heard me coming home so he came running to the door. He opened it up....no shirt on and, yes, I said he's old....and started chatting...about nothing. He seemed to be all excited to have someone to talk to and I felt sorry for his bored old soul (plus I couldn't think of an excuse to say no right away) so I accepted his invitation inside. He chatted away, every once in a while checking his facebook messages online, while I sat there and tried to be nice and listen politely. He kept getting more and more condescending, though, and I was becoming less and less of a fan.

At one point, he literally motioned to the books on his shelves and said "Look at all the books I've read." Yes. At another point, while talking about finding English students, he told me, "I could introduce you to people but first I need to know what you know" and went on to ask me if I'd read some book. I fought the urge to tell him that, while I hadn't read the book, I at least knew how to properly speak English and had been teaching it at least someone successfully for the past four years, which I doubt he has. I, instead, politely declined, reminding him that I already had students here and would be leaving the city soon anyway. He told me "Well, I know people all over the world. I can help you do whatever you want. You just have to tell me." Again, I declined.

At another point in this conversation (I think at a time when I'd said I needed to get going in order to skype a friend, which wasn't entirely true), he told me that we "Yankees" don't know our neighbors at all but that, here in Brazil, if you don't know your neighbors, there's a real problem. I've since asked multiple Brazilians about this and they said that, here in Brasilia, that's certainly not the case. I also informed him that, depending where you are in the U.S., you probably know a bunch of your neighbors as well.

I resisted all urges to punch him in his condescending, shirtless, old-man gut and instead headed home.