I’ve just restarted Portuguese lessons after a long drought over the Christmas and New Year period. I kicked off with a nice easy session, with a teacher who does sessions where you watch, listen or read something together and she explains cultural references. This time I went for something super-lowbrow, namely a show called “Quem Quer Namorar Com o Agricultor?” (“Who wants to date the farmer?”). It’s a reality TV franchise that has been shown in quite a few countries and arrived in Portugl last year. You can guess the premise: 5 farmers of various ages go to a fancy house where they are introduced to about 20 broody ladies and they have to decide which to invite home to the farm where they will be filmed reacting with horror to various unfamiliar smells and getting theatrically stink-eyed by the farmer’s mother/sister/teenage daughter. Presumbly at the end there will be a marriage or two but I haven’t got there yet.
I don’t really have much time to watch TV, and I’ve never got into any reality TV apart from hate-watching a couple of series of The Apprentice, so it was sort of nice to have an excuse to watch something as unapologetically shit-headed as this. The languge level is pretty basic too, so it wsn’t hard to follow. I actually liked it and will definitely watch more but only when my wife isn’t there to take the piss out of me (which I will deserve of course because I mean really…)
I’ve also been watching, on my own time, a documentary series about the colonial wars in Africa, which is more educational but much, much harder work.
Luso 