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I took Spanish all throughout High School but once they offered a short course in Portuguese and for some reason it sounded interesting and I signed up. A couple of years later, when I came back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to go back to Tulane, I worked as a bar manager in an Italian restaurant. A large influx of Brazilians mostly coming from Boston had moved into the area because of the new work opportunties. Construction jobs and restaurant jobs were desperately seeking out people who would work. The restaurant where I worked decided to start a visa program bringing Brazilians in for a short period of time to work as cooks in our restaurant. They could speak Spanish much better than English and so I would communicate with them in a Port-espan-glish language. Well within months my Spanish had remarkedly improved. One day I decided that I should take advantage of the opportunity and learn Portuguese. I showed up to work and asked the Brazilians to stop speaking to me in Spanish, only Portuguese. I took a class at Tulane to improve my grammar. That next summer I decided to do an internship in Rio and really tune up my Portuguese. That was all it took. I was hooked. After three months in Rio, I was already scheming to go back. Although I had already missed all the study abroad deadlines at Tulane, I convinced them to allow me to participate in study abroad. They didn’t have a program in Rio, and so I wrote a persuasive essay explaining why I should be able to study at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro and not another program that Tulane sponsors. I finally convinced them to let me go! Since then I have spent about a year and a half in Brazil. I feel as if I have my own little family there in another culture across the world. 
