Our lives just got 100% easier. I had told my friend Debbie that we’d been taking photos of signs in store windows and then coming home to look up the words on our translation app. Debbie shared my belief that we were being terribly clever. Forget that. We were just making life harder than it needed to be. Her son and favorite techno-wizard, Perry gave us the key to the kingdom when he told us about an amazing app. The Google Translate app is the closest thing to magic I’ve seen since the time I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus. With this app and your chosen language loaded in, you can simply point your phone at any printed or written word and the phone screen shows you the sign in English. Wait! There’s more! It shows it to you in the same font and colors as the original sign! Harry and Hermione never had it so easy.
And that’s still not all. With this same app, you can speak a sentence into your phone and it repeats it to the person standing next to you in their language! They can answer you in their native tongue, and your phone says it in English! Hot damn, this is fun! The only teensy problem we have is that Google only has Brazilian Portuguese available, which varies a bit from the European language. For now, we’ll need to stick to the basics, like using it to order food in a restaurant, or translating cooking instructions, but that’ll help a lot!
Before our world expanded so greatly, we took an expedition to a large shopping mall nearby. It was about a 25-minute walk – mostly uphill – but it was worth the effort. We discovered it contains a multiplex cinema which will help feed my craving for movies. There are the usual mall-type stores of clothing, jewelry, perfumes, and electronics, too. But a major attraction for us was a gigantic store appropriately named Jumbo. It has everything from auto parts to WaterPiks, and was akin to a Target on steroids. Those Americans who believe only the USA has mega-sized stores are clearly mistaken.
We’d been told before we came here that we’d be hard pressed to find peanut butter, except in rare expat-centered gourmet shops. Well, we found Skippy today. It was in tiny jars, about the size of baby food, and was ridiculously expensive. I bought two. I mean, a gal’s gotta have her PBJ, right? (Tip for anyone coming over to visit us: A jar of Smuckers Natural Peanut Butter would win you the undying gratitude of your hostess.)
After loading up our back pack and a big tote with groceries and miscellaneous items, we headed home. Because the Portuguese seem less inclined to sit, we observed the usual shortage of benches in the huge mall. Consequently, we were on our feet nonstop for over two hours, counting the walk there and back. I can’t recall the last time we exerted ourselves like that, but that’s one of the reasons we think we’ll like our car-free, European lifestyle. (And one reason I love ibuprofen!)
By the way, I saw a very cool system inside the mall. In addition to the regular escalators like we see everywhere in the US, this place had a set of automatic ramps that smoothly and safely transported strollers, wheelchairs, and shopping carts up and down long, gentle slopes. See photo below.
