only people living within 100 m from🇲🇽

I can. My family heritage is Puerto Rican and so while I am not fluent, I can pick my way through Spanish relatively well.

When I was going to school for aircraft maintenance, I had a part-time job at a local McDonald’s after class. This particular McDonald’s was staffed almost entirely by Brazilian immigrants, although one of the supervisors was actually from Cape Verde. I was positioned on the register upfront since the entire kitchen. Staff spoke fluent Portuguese and some of them spoke little or no English.

There was a sizable Brazilian population in the area and so needless to say I was exposed to a lot of Portuguese. More than a few times I would have customers walk up to me and start making their order in Portuguese and when it was clear that I wasn’t entirely following them, they would become very apologetic when they realize I didn’t speak. Portuguese fluently myself and switched over to English.

I was quite flattered actually when one customer did the same thing and when I let him know that I didn’t speak Portuguese, he said he didn’t realize because I looked Portuguese myself. I will never complain about someone thinking that I look Brazilian lol.😆 Though I don’t see it myself😊

While I was able to occasionally pull out words, particularly when a team lead jokingly said to me “¡Ah, cala a boca!” it was close enough to “¡Oh, cállate la boca!” That I was able to quickly respond much to the intense amusement of my coworkers.

To my ear Portuguese sounds like the flourished accents of Italian with a Spanish sounding familiarity. But it is definitely very distinct to me from Spanish. (This is literally just my attempt to describe how it sounds to my ear, this is a very subjective description of the difference to me of Portuguese and Spanish.)

I do wanna say that the Brazilian team members I worked with were some of the kindest and most fun people I’ve ever worked with in my life. The same team lead I mentioned above cheerfully told me that they would have me speaking, fluent Portuguese by the end of the year.

Of all the jobs I’ve had in my life I have never been made to feel more at ease and welcome than I did at that McDonald’s with a crew that mostly spoke a language that I didn’t speak at all. Sadly, I graduated school and left that job, I would’ve loved to have stayed longer and learned the language myself.