Brazil Feb/March 2007 Day 4

It was an interesting day today.  We had lectures all day with Dr Vani and Marcelo as translator.  We covered all the possible abutments you can use for implants with the Brazilian Titanium Fix systems.  For non dental readers, abutments are the bits that connect implants to the crowns, bridges or dentures above and there are loads of them.  We also went through some different impression techniques again.

Dr Vani with Marcelo doing simultaneous translation

My Portuguese is what you would call "survival level",  However Marcelo was late after lunch because he had to make a phone call.  Dr Vani asked me to take over as translator.  It went well for a few minutes and then luckily Marcelo arrived just as I was about to run out of language skills.

Mohammed self appoints as lecturer

workshop with Dr Vani

If you would like to see what a dental lecture is like in Portuguese then translated into English then click this link.  It will probably only work if you are using Microsoft internet Explorer.

In the evening we were driven to Sao Jose dos Campos which is about 45 minutes to an hour away.  We had a great meal out with some people from the Titanium Fix company.

Night out in San Jose dos Campos, Yih Jia, Raj, Margaret and Deirdre. In the background is Junior from the Titanium Fix Company

at the other end of the table is Michele, Nilene and Hugo from Titanium Fix and Nadeem after a hard day,

Michele (pronounced Miss Shelley, strangely) is a translator and teacher of English and Portuguese.  She is one of those linguists whose English is better than most English people. You can hardly tell that she is not English except that she probably speaks the language too perfectly.  She helped everyone to choose from the menu and I chose fish with fried potatoes.  She told me that I had made a very English choice so I asked her what a Brazilian guy would choose. "He wouldn't choose fish at all", she replied, "he would only choose meat".  We compromised and I had the fish anyway with a kind of mashed banana thing and lemon rice. It was really good.

I tried to persuade Michele to come to Pindamonhangaba to give me a Portuguese lesson on my day off on Saturday.  She wasn't having it though.  However she was kind enough to give me her e-mail address should I have any pressing Portuguese language queries.  Thanks Michele.

Michele and Nilene