Getting this started

My adventure in international teaching started today, with the first meeting of my class at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. The course, "Where Do Genres Come From?" is a special winter offering by the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras (PPGL) in the Centro de Artes e Comunicação, that is, the graduate program in letters, which includes both literature and linguistics and has a strong emphasis on teacher preparation and pedagogical research. I have students in both master's and doctoral programs. We meet from 2:00-5:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays for four weeks.

The academic schedule here in the southern hemisphere has a short session in mid-July between the two main semesters, May-June and August-November. My course is a special offering with the major concession that I teach in English, since I know almost no Portuguese. I have about 20 students and several auditors, many of whom teach English as a second language and all of whom have studied English.

I arrived in Recife two days ago, Sunday afternoon, after about a 24-hour journey: Raleigh to Miami to São Paulo to Recife. The big news for me on Saturday when I started was that I finally got the upgrade to business class on the international flight that had been requested months ago, and it included an upgrade to first class on the Raleigh-to-Miami flight. In business class, they fed us very well and it was actually possible to sleep on the overnight flight. In tourist class, there was beverage service and snacks for sale.

Recife is about 8º south of the equator, right on the coast, and winter here is about 25–30ºC, breezy, sunny, and somewhat humid. It's two time zones east of Eastern, but with no daylight savings, it's only one hour earlier. The sun sets at 5:15 or so and it's pitch-dark by 6:00. There is no lingering twilight (or dawn, probably, but I haven't watched it) because of the latitude, and I am reminded of the line from Kipling's "Mandalay" (ok, I googled this to be sure) that "the dawn comes up like thunder." In this case it would be that the dark comes down like thunder.

I have a small sixth-floor apartment in a high-rise residential hotel a block from the beach, with an ocean view between two other high-rises that are right on the beach. There are two AC units, but I prefer to leave the windows open to the breeze and the street noises, which include music, traffic, voices, and--Sunday night during and after the Argentina–Brazil soccer game—a lot of whooping and hollering and firecrackers. And always behind everything else, the sound of the surf.

I am driven around by my academic host, Professor Angela Dionisio, and another colleague, Professor Judith Hoffnagel. They have helped me purchase groceries, taken me to restaurants, and provided translation at crucial moments. I arrived back at the apartment this evening after 5:30 to discover that the power was out, apparently just in my room, and it took some doing for the hotel people and me to get this resolved with very little language in common. My rusty Spanish helped a little, and I am trying to get my ears used to the different phonetic system in Portuguese and the ways that cognates work.

I was slower getting this started than I had intended, and already many details that seemed fascinating when they happened are old news to me now, but it's time to quit for now. I had originally intended to publish this blog on the NC State University blog server, but have not been able to login there (possibly because of the foreign ISP?) and my messages to the Help desk have not been acknowledged (again, possibly they look like spam).