From the Beginning!

Hey guys, so this is gonna be a bit long, so if you don’t mind, you can bear with me. So far everything here has been absolutely amazing. Even days and nights where not much happens are fun! Most nights in Salvador my sister and I would just go to a bar down the street, grab a cold beer (which is SO amazing on a hot night), and practice our Portuguese. Everything here is just so relaxing. But now on to some interesting/funny stories (I hope). So one night our host sister invited us to go to a Forro show (Style of dance and music) with her and her bf and her cousin. The cousin taught my sister and I how to dance, and we took turns. It was pretty difficult moving my feet, considering how little dancing Ive done in my life like this. Anyways, some random guy comes up to ask me to dance, and I tell him (In Portuguese) no thanks, im waiting for my hamburger and he keeps trying to convince me but I held my ground (he was old and had bad breath). Later he comes up to me to get me to dance again and I turn around and pretend Im dancing with the cousin who was right next to me, which is totally something I would do in America in this situation, but here it DOESN’T fly! He came up to me later and started yelling at me about how I needed to show some respect and he was lecturing me and I said sorry like three times and he kept being like NO, NO RESPEITO, like respect this respect that and I just got super flustered and turned around and started crying, so then the boyfriend and the cousin and my sister stepped in and told him he was an asshole and needed to leave me alone. Everyone was really nice about this situation, even though it was very embarrassing to cry in front of everyone. Lesson Learned: In Brazil, you do not tell people you don’t wanna dance with them, you don’t want to go out with them etc, you HAVE to have an excuse, no exceptions, otherwise they get extremely offended. You cannot say no I don’t want to or no I’m not interested, it is extremely frowned upon, here you say “Tenho um comprimisso” you have other plans, and even if you see the person out, or you dance with someone else, the lie is better than the truth, it does not bother them to see you dance with someone after you just told them you were tired or busy!!