Aya

An unexpected and very much enjoyed bonus to our trip to Florianopolis with my folks was a visit from our Japanese friend Aya.  When she heard Mom & Dad were planning to visit Brazil, she wanted to come too and visit all of us in a location she has never experienced.  It was crazy, short notice, short timing but she did it, and we are so glad.  She taught my kids Japanese (because their little brains aren't full enough of language!) and they asked her millions of questions.  She was most willing to listen, to answer, to play.  She brought them fun little souvenirs and treats from afar.

We also had plenty of late nights of adult visits, catching up on the past 4 or 5 years.  She lived with me in college, and accompanied me home for holidays, weekends, and became another surrogate daughter for my parents.  We've visited her several times in Japan and were happy to repay the favor as tour guide and translator to her.  We tried, in our limited time, to give her a Brazilian experience.  It was a bit difficult for us, because one of the benefits for our family while in a big city/tourist area like Florianopolis is that we have the opportunity to live a little American....there was McDonalds, Subway, Pizza Hut and a Mexican restaurant....there was a big extravagant shopping mall and a lot of conveniences that we do not experience in our daily life here in Horizontina.  But we did our best to show her this very tiny corner of Brazil, to feed her some Brazilian meals, load her up with tropical fruit and teach her a little about Brazil and Portuguese before all too soon putting her back on an airplane toward Tokyo. 

Curiously, though I thought I remembered no Japanese, Aya spoke to me almost exclusively in Japanese and I understood.  I responded almost totally in English.  My brain was really fried by the end of the week.  I am typically official family translator, so I spent the week listening in Japanese, English and Portuguese, and responding in English, Portuguese and occasionally Japanese.  Add to that there are a large number of tourists in Floripa from other South American countries, so many people speak Spanish, and when I speak Portuguese that isn't quite right (which is almost always) people there assumed I am a Spanish speaker, and then start talking to me in Spanish.  Whew.  When we got back to Horizontina I slipped up more than once mixing languages such as slipping a Japanese word in a Portuguese sentence.  It took a couple of weeks to get back on track. 

While I'm afraid a trip to Japan is not likely for our whole family, it was fun to share this little, but very important part of my past with them through Aya.