Portugal slideshow from Jason Kirkman on Vimeo.

When I walked down a street in Sofia, somebody stopped me in my tracks and said something to me that I did not understand. He was speaking n Bulgarian. It made me feel uncomfortable. I wish I could have said that I did not speak Bulgarian, but I couldn’t even say that.

When we were on the airplane from London to Bulgaria, I was terrified. What was I going to say to the woman beside me who was speaking in Bulgarian to me?  Luckily she was from London and spoke English too. When she said, “Oh, do you speak Bulgarian?” I said “No. Do you?”

She said, “A little bit. What’s your name?”

I said, “Bella. What’s yours?”

She said, “Niki.”

Then I felt brave, happy, and excited too, because she was going to teach me Bulgarian. She taught me how to say “hello” in Bulgarian. She said say “zdra-ve-te”, and I did. I’ve been in Bulgaria for six weeks now, and I’m still not good at speaking Bulgarian, but I’m getting the hang of it.

When you’re traveling you should learn some basic words because they will come in handy. I think it’s important to learn numbers, letters, and words like “hello”, “good-bye”, and “I don’t understand”.  I also think it is important to know how to say “thank you”. In Bulgarian thank you is “blah-goo-dar-ya”, but you can also say “merci”.  In Spanish thank you is “gracias”, in Portuguese it’s “obrigada (o)”, in Arabic it’s “chokran” ???? and in French it’s “merci”.

From The Big Field Trip – Tunisia, March, 2009

In Bulgaria it is important to know the head signals too. Shaking your head  from side to side means “yes” and nodding up and down means “no.” Learning this is very difficult. Once someone asked me if I understood Bulgarian, and I shook my head. So he kept on talking in Bulgarian.

When I got to Bulgaria, I did not know how to speak any Bulgarian except for what I learned from Niki. The hardest part about learning Bulgarian is they write very differently than we do. My name is spelled like this in Bulgarian ????e??!

I learned languages in many different ways. Mom has been speaking Spanish to me since I was born, so in Peru I was fine speaking in Spanish. My understanding of Spanish helped me learn Portuguese in Brazil and Portugal because these two languages are very alike. When we went to Brazil, my family and I took Portuguese lessons. Cyrus and I took one lesson before Mama and Papa took another lesson. We took lessons from a professional young lady. Inãe was very patient and very nice. I even learned by reading books and listening to people on the sidewalks chattering to each other.

From The Big Field Trip – Brazil, December, 2008

I learned Arabic and French in Tunisia. I took lessons from a young lady named Fadoua, who taught us French. Sometimes she taught us arts and crafts because she was in college studying art. Yousef was a friend of ours from Tunisia who took us to the Sahara Desert. He spoke Arabic, French, English, and Italian, and taught us some Arabic.

From Bulgaria

I am learning the Cyrillic alphabet in Bulgaria. I listen to Bulgarian language podcasts with my family. My mom taught me how to say “goodbye”. You stay it like this “do-veezh-de-ne”. Both of my brothers have shirts that have the Cyrillic alphabet written on them. Mom quizzes us on the Bulgarian alphabet and animal names every day. I read signs on the streets. Ventzi, our Bulgarian teacher, has taught us names of animals. Bird is “petitza”. Now I can go to the grocery store and say “pet mlyako molya”. (They will give me five cartons of milk). There is still a lot more that I need to learn, but at least now I know how to say “ne razbirum Bulgarski”, which means “I don’t understand Bulgarian”. That gets me out of a lot of difficult situations.

From Bulgaria

I still have many languages to study, from Turkish to Hindi to Thai. I’ve got an adventure in front of me and lots to learn.  In the past year that we’ve been traveling I’ve felt scared of learning each new language, but now I know that I can learn to say some basic words and that will help me to communicate with people in tricky situations. Now I feel brave and excited to learn new languages.

From The Big Field Trip – Spain, May, 2009

      We spent one week in Sevilla (Seville), which is in Southern Spain. We went to a pigeon park and fed the pigeons little nuts and seeds. Each packet of pigeon food was 1.50 euro (1 euro is about 1.50 dollars). If you ever put your hand out above the pigeons with seeds in them, they will fly to your hand, land on your fingers, and peck at the seeds. You can catch them, but they are uncomfortable and flap their wings, so you have to let them go. Diego, my friend from Zaragoza (in another part of Spain) came to visit us for two days. He caught some pigeons too. Then we went to a museum where they had stone lion sculptures built by the Romans. Then we saw a baby bird and I wanted to catch it, but my mom said that the bird’s mom would sniff it and smell the human and think that it’s a human and fly away. My mom, Cy, and I saw flamenco dancers. They stomped their feet and it made a loud noise. There was a singer who sang like he was crying and a guitarist who tapped his feet while he played the guitar. We saw a bullfight, but it is too horrible to talk about.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, June 2009

     The first place we went to in Portugal was Coimbra. Coimbra is a small city with a nice river park. You could walk over the bridge and then you will get to the other side. If you walk down the path you will get to a science museum. At the science museum we made our own aliens. Mine was an octopus that had a beak, ate rotten meat, and had three human eyes. It was sticky and slimy. There was a puzzle that had parts of the human body. I made it all confusing, and I put it back together. It took like 40 minutes. We lived in an old building. Our apartment was at the top (up 45 steps). We were on the same hill as the university. The roads were cobblestone. I thought Coimbra was awesome. It had Fado singing. Men sang while the women watched. In the rest of Portugal women sing.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, June 2009

     After Coimbra we lived in Cabo Espichel for two weeks. Cabo Espichel is on coast of Portugal near Lisbon. We finished our school work. In Cabo Espichel there was a dog that got its leg cut off by a tractor blade. His name was Jijo. We had a mini-pool, but the water too was cool to swim in. There were a lot of fruit trees. There were cherries, oranges, lemons, figs, plums, apples, and peaches (one of the peach trees broke from the blowing wind). I caught bees with my bare hands. The bees were pollinating the flowers. There were butterflies too, and a hummingbird moth. We went to the beach in Sesimbra and met a 10 year-old girl who spoke Spanish and was from Peru, but lived in Lisbon. I buried a girl’s ball in the sand. We played tag in the water, and it was really quite fun.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, June 2009

     We took a day trip to Sintra, which is a town near Lisbon. There was a big castle on a rocky hill. As we were walking to the castle, there was a cat that was hunting, and it caught a rat. I thought the cat was bringing the rat to its babies. It ran up to the rocks, and I ran after it. It started cat-growling after me. I slipped off a rock and fell to the soft, leafy ground. When I got up, I looked around, and I guess she already got to her babies, because she wasn’t there. It was cool to see a domesticated cat living a bobcat or a bear. In Sintra we went to a palace that seemed like a fairy-tale castle. The King and Queen of Portugal lived there a hundred years ago. It was cool. Outside there were grassy ruins, and I saw the same cat in there. There was a forest. All the trees were from all over the world. Inside the palace every room was fancy. There was furniture with rabbit fur, and it was fluffy. I wanted to live in the Queen’s room. The Queen even had a velvet bidet.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, July 2009

     After we left Cabo Espichel, we went to Sao Joao de Tarouca, which is a small village. In Sao Joao we had a huge chlorine pool. There was a dog, a cat, and at least a dozen lizards that climbed in our house and around our walls. The lizards couldn’t swim (I tried it in the bird bath). We had a castle house with six bedrooms and five bathrooms. It was built of large blocks of granite. We had such a big place because Grandma, Aunt Cathy, Aunt Connie, Erica, Julian, and Zacciah came to visit us. There was a little house outside. I thought it was a chicken house, but it was for storing corn. I let Zacciah use my goggles in the pool, but he didn’t give them back (eventually he did). It was fun to be on vacation and have great guests.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, July 2009

     After that we went with all of our company to live in Ponte de Cavez for almost three weeks. Ponte de Cavez was not even a village – it only had like three houses. There was a river with lots of fish and fishermen on the other side of the house. Once I went to fish with Grandma, and we got a fish (a man gave it to us). It died. We had a swimming pool that we could drink out of (if nobody peed in it). The water came from a spring. There were three dogs – a big dog and two puppies. The big dog was tied up so three quarters and a half of the time we couldn’t play with it. The puppies were really cute. Whenever I cuddled with them for a long time and left, they would follow me, and when I ran, they ran. They were really fast for puppies.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, July 2009

     I went on a little trip to Spain with Grandma, Aunt Cathy, Aunt Connie, and Mom. We went to Santiago de Compostela to see a big party. There were a lot of fireworks that almost blew up half the church. They made boob cheese there. It was because a man made a sculpture of an angel, and it had way too big boobs. He was ordered to make the boobs smaller. The people in town did not like that, so they started making “queso tetilla”, which means “boob cheese”.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

     When everyone left, we went to Talasnal. Talasnal is a town where all of the homes are made of schist, which is a flat stone. It had about a dozen cats. There was a teeny-tiny German shepherd that jumped on me, and when I ran it tried to bite my heels. If you take about a half an hour or 45 minute walk down hill (because Talasnal is up on a high hill), you get to a beautiful river beach. In the river beach there are a lot of young and old people swimming or bathing. There was a diving board six feet above the water. If you jump into the water, you won’t touch the ground because it is really deep down. It is about a 45 minute to an hour walk back up the big hill to Talasnal.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

     Next we went to Lisboa (what the Portuguese call Lisbon). Lisboa is the biggest city in Portugal. Lisboa is cool because there are a lot of parks, and there is a butterfly garden where you can actually see butterflies laying eggs on leaves. I saw caterpillars forming chrysalises and butterflies hatching from chrysalises. I also saw many pairs of monarch butterflies mating. One of those pairs was flying and mating. I went to a puppet museum. There were puppets from Sri Lanka in masks that were Naga Rakshas, which means “snake demons”. One night I went on a date with Papa and Cy. We went on a movie date. We saw The African Queen in the Film Museum. I thought it was really cool. When I went on a Fado date with Mom, we stayed up til about midnight watching fado. It is a very actionative music (that should be a word that means that do every single emotion). In Lisbon we made two really good friends, Clyde and Nico. Nico’s birthday was on September 2nd (I think). I made a poster that said, “To Nico: Happy Birthday – Bella”. I gave her a plastic horse too. We spent four days in London and then went to Bulgaria. I’ll write soon about London and Bulgaria.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

The Portuguese were some of the best explorers from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries, during the Portuguese Age of Exploration. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to sail to India, they discovered Brazil and it was a Portuguese captain who led the first successful voyage around the world. The Portuguese motivation for sailing around Africa to India was to control the spice trade. Prince Henry the Navigator funded and organized step-by-step voyages around Africa to India.

A CARRACK.       From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

Prince Henry was the son of the King of Portugal. He created a seafaring school that trained many navigators. Portugal was a poor country, and the Christian kings had just gained control from the Moors.  The Portuguese were fenced in on three sides by mountains and the Spanish, who were powerful competitors. If the Portuguese wanted to expand and trade, their only option was to sail the Atlantic. At this time the Italians controlled the spice trade by trading with Muslims in the Mediterranean. Prince Henry determined that if the Portuguese wanted to seize control of the spice trade, they would have to sail around Africa to India. They would have to sail into the unknown, for no Europeans had ever been there before. There would have to be well-trained navigators to chart these unexplored territories.

A CARAVEL.    From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

The voyagers had to be able to use instruments of measure, read and draw accurate maps. Some of the instruments of measure were, compasses, maps of the voyagers before, octants (used to find latitude), reflecting circles (used for finding longitude) and sun dials (used for finding time).The ships used were usually Carracks, ships with three or four masts, large enough to carry food and water for long voyages and Caravels, small ships with two or three masts that were easy to maneuver. As sailors explored more and more territory along the African coast, their navigational skills got better and better. They became familiar with their tools. They made small adjustments to their tools and invented more accurate tools to help them explore. By making more and more detailed maps and building outposts along the way, step-by-step the Portuguese came closer to Indian spices.

THE REFLECTING CIRCLE.  From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009

It was on the night of July 27^th, 1497 that Vasco de Gama prayed in a small church in Lisbon before his attempt to round Africa to get to India with four ships and 170 men. On May 20^th 1498 after battling storms and escaping Muslims he finally reached India. He traded for spice, and eager to get home, he sailed right into the wind. It took 132 days to reach Malinda, a village in southern Kenya, though it took only 23 to go the other way. On that trip, about one half of Vasco’s crew died. When Vasco de Gama got to Portugal, only two of his ships remained, but the spice paid for the ships and more.

          The Portuguese traveled all over the world and traded increasing variety of goods. They acquired goods like spice, precious, metals, silk, slaves, cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg. Because they were the first Europeans to reach South America, Southern Africa, India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, they had many trading opportunities and their country became very rich. You can still see evidence of their wealth from the Age of Exploration in the churches and palaces here in Portugal. The Portuguese had many colonies, but most of them were taken over by the English, Dutch, and French. The Portuguese still celebrate their national heroes from the Golden Age of Portugal, people like Vasco de Gama and Prince Henry the Navigator.

From The Big Field Trip – Portugal, August 2009