I was thinking maybe I should elaborate a little on how I ended up learning English at all… You see, I was born in Brazil and even though from pre-school to high school I was taught English I never learned past the basics. Not only I was a shitty student there was no one to practice English with. And I do mean shitty: expelled twice, repeated a year and some more lovely stuff my mom wishes never happened, anyways without English the chances of me getting a great job was pretty much zilch.
My dad at the time worked for a travel agency and he was a tour guide on monthly trips to the US and Canada. Since he had a great experience when he was sent to Switzerland for a year, he thought I would too. So, at 22, they packed me away and sent me to Canada to live with a family. The plan was for me to go to an English intensive school and after 6 months go back to Brazil and get a decent job.
I flew to Montreal with my dad and the next day met the people I was supposed to live with. They were great, nice Italian and French speaking people… They barely could speak English, so I felt quite at home.
The first meal they served me was a salad with flowers in it, purple pansies. I remember thinking, oh shit! Here I was in a Montreal suburb, with very little money, eating flowers. Ha ha ha! But my new “family” was very nice and soon I learned to blend in with them. The reality was that for the first time in my life I had to make my own bed, clean my dishes and be mindful of people’s spaces; here I had no maids, no family, no friends and I couldn’t even speak the language. The year was 1987; my dad paid the family $450 a month plus my school fees and gave me about $50 a month allowance, I find that totally amusing since the bus/metro cost $1 a day, so I had about $20 a month spending money. Somehow I stretched it so on Fridays I was able to have a couple of beers with my new friends.
Those months were truly a happy time; somehow I never felt afraid, alone, and I never felt I couldn’t do it, I absorbed as much as I could. My routine was simple, every day take the bus and metro to downtown Montreal where I would go to school for half a day, then hang out with my new Brazilian friend Rogerio until late afternoon, then I would go back to the Sauvé neighborhood I lived. I stayed in Montreal for four months, where I learned a good basis for my English but most importantly learned that I could trust myself and that I could deal with whatever life threw my way.
