Rj Chapter 3.1 - Brazilian Girls and Lessons Learned

If you like stories about the stupid situations I manage to get myself in then strap in. This ones a doozy.

I have to start at the weekend of November 3^rd because that’s where I left off. At this point, Daniel’s GF and her brother are in the midst of their visit to Rio and staying with us. Her brother, Alex, left right before the start of this November 3^rd weekend so I was going to be stuck with Daniel and his GF. Rather than spending a weekend in third-wheel land I opted for the option of flying to a new city in Brazil to do some exploring. The destination of choice was Salvador, another coastal city to the North East of Rio and just a two hour flight away.

Something they don’t tell you about domestic flights in Brazil. They are f***ing expensive. A two hour flight to this place was almost $700 CAD roundtrip which is around the same for a Trans-Atlantic flight from Canada. Just to go to a random city in Brazil that 99.9% of people have never heard of.

What was the motive behind this? Well, I made plans with a girl that I met a couple weeks prior to meet there and spend the weekend together. I wasn’t going to let Daniel have all the romance. I hit it off with this girl.. let’s call her Sarah.. at a bar in Rio (Bosque bar if you read my last post) when she was visiting here for a few days. For those wondering what is so special about Sarah that I went so far out of my way to meet up with her – she had no redeemable qualities I remembered asides from being very attractive. On the other hand, it would also give me a chance to explore a new city which I want to do every month while I’m here.

Friday morning comes around with my flight and I make it to the hotel in Salvador in the afternoon. Sarah is waiting for me in the lobby so I greet her and check in. One of the first questions I asked her was “How was your bus ride in?” (she took a couple hour bus ride from her home city). She just looks at me with a blank stare. I ask it again, thinking she didn’t hear me. Nothing. It was then and there that I remembered, holy **** this girl doesn’t speak a word of English. I met her one of the first nights I went out in Rio (so I went hard) and even though we hung out for a long time, I didn’t remember any of the conversations we had at all. And over text, she would write in English, but it was probably DeepL (great translator app) because I couldn’t tell it was being translated.

I would bet any amount of money that no one reading this has had to spend a full weekend with a stranger that they have no means of communicating with other than translator apps and sign language. I could write a 50 page journal entry about this experience but I don’t want to relive the whole thing and put anyone through reading it. So here is the short version of it.

Friday, the day I got there, consisted of us going to a beach club, restaurant, and bar. 85% of the time was spent in complete silence and her on her phone looking at instagram. Normally, if someone had their phone out around me while we we’re 1on1 I’d be like wtf, but in this case it was totally welcome because it meant that I didn’t have to try and make conversation. Saturday I got to see an incredibly beautiful beach, do some exploring in the city, and continue to sit beside Sarah in silence while gazing off into the distance or at my phone. The most frequent noises on the trip with her were listening to the waves crashing onto the beach and the sound of me tapping my credit card. Saturday night rolls around and we have dinner reservations at some Italian restaurant. At this point, I’m making my escape plan for Sunday morning so that I can go to the beach the next day without her and not wait with her to catch her bus at 4pm the next day.

Then, by the grace of God, something happens at dinner.

She gets a call from her mom that her grandmother is in the hospital and that she has to go home that night. Naturally, she starts freaking out and I’m googling the next bus ride home for her. It’s 8pm at this point and there’s only one bus left that night at 9pm. If we run out now and she gets ready in Olympic time, maybe she’ll have time to catch it. We rush home and, in a frenzy, she throws everything in her suitcase and within a matter of 15 minutes she’s out the door and in the Uber. I go back up to the room and take the deepest sighs of relief of my life and figure out what I’m going to do with my newfound freedom.

Note: It’s totally possible she just made that up to leave early but it worked out either way.

At this point it’s only 9pm so I decide to head out and explore one of the bar areas that looks busy on the map. After seeing all the options of places to go I decide to go to an outdoor market and grab some drinks and just chill. There was a local band playing and everyone at this place was dancing and singing and having a great time. Easily the best part of the trip so far. That being said, Salvador doesn’t have much in the way of nightlife and I was probably one of 5 gringos in a city of 4 million people so there was no point in trying to hard to find something. I also had another full day in Salvador because my flight was Monday morning.

On top of that, being the astute planner that I am, I had arranged a date for the next day anyways with a different girl that lives in Salvador, and more importantly, one that spoke English. By this point, I had pretty much been mute for 48 hours so I was looking forward to using my vocal chords again.

I met up with Sunday girl in the afternoon at a beach club, and she passed the vibe check with flying colors. We had such a good day I could almost say the trip was worth it…

..Until Monday morning came around.

My flight was at 9am on Monday morning and I woke up at 7:15 thinking it would only be a 20-minute Uber to the airport. It turned out to be 45 minutes and I arrived at the check-in desk at 8:15, 45 min before my flight, thinking I’d be totally fine because it was a domestic flight so there’s no customs to go through. I hadn’t done my check-in because it wasn’t working online so I figured the website had an issue and no one could check in. When I get to the desk, they tell me that in fact the website was working and that they can’t check people in less than an hour before the flight and that I had to go to the service desk to get rebooked on another flight.

Amazing.

At the service desk I get told that because I booked with an Agency (Kayak) and not with the airline directly, that they can’t rebook my flight and that I have to buy another ticket. All this is happening on like 2 hours of sleep and while I’m supposed to be online at work taking calls. Even better, a one-way flight back to Rio is like $600 for the same day and the day after. At this point, I just accept the loss and donate what will hopefully be my last payment ever in the city of Salvador.

So now I have 8 hours to kill at the airport before my flight so I load up on coffee and try to do whatever I can for work. I get back home in Rio at like 11pm and pass out immediately.

In hindsight, I’m I don’t regret going to Salvador but I definitely regret Sarah. I took it as a lesson that no matter how hot she is, it’s not worth if you can’t speak.

The positives that came out of that weekend were that I learned more Portuguese in 36 hours than in the course of one month in Brazil because it was pretty much adapt or die. I got to see some really cool beaches like this one below called Stella Maris beach. The restaurants were fantastic. And probably the coolest thing was a neighborhood in Salvador called Pelourinho which I thought looked vaguely familiar when I was there, but had no idea why. The girl on Sunday then told me that it was where Michael Jackson filmed the music video for “They Don’t Really Care About Us”. It was such a glass shattering moment because I probably watched that video a thousand times when I was a kid and getting to end up there by complete accident all these years later felt like an incredible coincidence. This has happened to me several times in my travels where I go somewhere I never heard about and learn about something that took place there that I had a close personal connection to in some way. Very full-circle kind of feeling.

For the sake of the reader’s time I’m going to leave the rest of the next post. This was just 4 days of the last 15. There have been a couple more experiences that really put me to the test since then, that I will share in the upcoming post.

Stay tuned and don’t fly to obscure South American cities to meet girls that don’t speak English

-MS