Things I Learned on my Mini Break in Portugal: 4. When you greet someone with "meatballs!" you are going to be friends for life.

View from our balcony of the square below.

Our hotel had poinsettias in the window boxes.

When we checked in to our hotel, we met the desk manager who must have been ending a long day. He was somewhat impolite and impatient as we asked about our room and a good place to eat lunch nearby. But this all changed the proceeding day, when he was back at the desk and we returned from a bit of sightseeing. What happened was a bit of linguistic magic.

But first, some background. None of us actually speak Portuguese. With our collective French and Spanish backgrounds, we could get around with little trouble but had no idea how to formulate sentences. Like any other responsible travelers, we felt it important to learn the basics before landing in a foreign country. Among our selected phrases that we studied from our free phrasebook on our Kindles (yes, there is one, if you are planning a trip!) was "good day," "bom dia" in Portuguese. Now back to our return....

We walked in, tired from walking around and still somewhat confused on "thank you."* I was racking my brain, trying to remember an alternate form of a greeting (other than ola, just like in Spain). Apparently Chiquita did the same, and halfway remembering "bom dia," she shouted out excitedly "abondigas!" to the manager.

I thought "bom dia" sounded funny when pronounced and as we rounded the corner, Trixie gasped "Oh, my gosh! I just said 'meatballs' to him in Spanish!" We all started giggling and went up to our room.

From then on, we were somewhat of celebrities in our hotel. The manager smiled and greeted us every time that we entered the room, and once, when we requested new passwords for the wireless, he laughed and answered "Oh, YES. I remember you. How can I forget?" And the maids- oh, the maids. They loved us. They must have heard the story (or also have a secret affection for blondes?) and every time that we got within yelling distance, would run up and start speaking in excited Portuguese to us. And what could we do but smile and nod back at them, pretending to know what in the world they were talking about. For all we knew, they were telling us that our room had just fallen into the street and we had nowhere to live.

So: while it can be embarrassing to butcher a perfectly beautiful language, it will make you friends. Meatballs to all.

* In Portugal, "obrigado" is for men to say and "obrigada" is for women to say. In the beginning, we thought that it depended on who you were addressing (as most other Romance languages make a distinction in this way). This caused some uncomfortable moments, like when one waiter would not stop laughing at our table every time that he placed something on it and we thanked him (you know, every time he was around). Then there was the other waiter that tried to re-explain it to us, with his lesson beginning "I am not gay. Obrigado."