say what?

Learning a foreign language takes one through the inevitable hills and valleys. On top of the hills, you're grooving, throwing out colorful turns of phrases and even the occasional hand gesture. In the valleys, your eyes cross as you grope for the correct conjugation of "to be" in the present tense and your eyes scan the horizon for the end of the sentence. But no matter how snappy your 8 pm dialogue is, when your tongue is loosened by that first glass of wine and your wits still relatively sharp, by about 12:30 AM, a few more glasses of wine, a cachaça or two, some draft beer, and you're drowning in a sea of Portuguese, barely hanging onto the current topic ("soccer"; "movies") much less the vocabularly, and you are barely able to sit up straight in your chair. And your Brazilian buddies are just getting started.

I'd been, I felt, spending more time on top of those hills lately, and was managing to understand probably a good 75% of what our Brazilian nanny/housekeeper spat out at me these days. So much so that I felt I could easily explain why after midnight it became hard to understand the language any more, and why by 3 AM we were pretty much destroyed.

"But you speak it so well!"

"Ah, thanks, thanks, but we get so exhausted that we start to forget things and just can't keep up after about midnight or so."

Meaningful pause.

"Now, what language is it that you guys speak, anyway?"

Puzzled silence.

"You mean, with each other? English?"

"No, no, here in Brazil."

"Um, Portuguese?"