My new Portuguese class !

I started taking a Portuguese class last Wednesday at the University of Lisbon. So, I can say, in Portuguese, sou estudante de português na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa ! I feel very lucky to be in this class. It's an intensive class so that means it meets from 9 to 1 Monday to Friday for 4 weeks. My teacher is really great. He prepares a lot of good exercises for us and loves to answer questions. He is also funny and interesting to listen to. And, he has created a blog for our class and sends all the materials he gives us in class as dropbox files with audio so we can listen and review at home. Thanks Rui !!! I also really like all of my classmates. There are about 8 of us from Holland, Germany, Venezuela, and the US. We also have classmates from Egypt, Austria, Libya and other countries in the higher-level classes. I'm in the beginning level class. It is interesting to see my teacher do many of the same kinds of exercises I do with my students in SF. For example, on Friday, he taught us parts of the body by showing a diagram and having us fill in the vocabulary on blank lines. I learned that "o joelho" is knee and "o cotovelo" is elbow. Hmmm....it all seems hard because it is all new. We also learned words for clothing, hair, and physical description. My homework for tomorrow is to bring in a photo of a person and describe them for the class. I found  a nice color photo of Robyn Hitchcock in Uncut (music magazine) that I'm going to use. He's wearing a blue shirt with white polka dots so that will be perfect since we learned how to say that. Ele esta a usar uma camisa azul as bolas brancas. Hope I can say that tomorrow. And, you can buy WINE in the school cafeteria ! Did I say how much I like this school ?