A few years ago in March, my Boss and I were sent down to visit a new plant our company was building in Brazil. Our first day did not go according to plan, here is a copy of the email I sent to my freinds that night after arriving. NOTE: I have removed last names and changed references to the company I work for in this public version of the email.

Coming to a FOX network near you soon: Brazil — The Series.

The plot:

Our two protagonists, a Network manager and his boss are sent to visit a new manufacturing plant in a foreign country in which neither speaks the language. They are given no training in culture, language, or social protocol. We give our two protagonists a cell phone which has not been activated, though we tell them it has been. Due to a series of oversights on the hosting party’s end, the driver arranged to pick them up from the airport never shows up. Watch as much hilarity ensues as we follow our heroes vain and futile attempts at using the cell phone, as they try and communicate with the natives, and steer around the other obstacles we’ve thrown their way. Sure to delight audiences of all ages.

As you may have surmised, the first day was quite a treat. We arrived at Sao Paulo Airport after a 9 hour flight, tired and having to look forward to another drive to another airport in Sao Paulo and then another flight to Curitiba, before being taken on another 30 minute drive to the plant. As we passed through customs and left the ‘arrivals’ gate in the airport, we immediately saw a vast line of people holding up signs of various companies and VIP’s names…drivers sent to pick up people coming off the plane. Strangely, no sign for our company was to be found. No sign that had my name on it seemed to be eagerly held by a hot Brazilian babe or strapping Brazilian lad as others had. We looked once, twice, and several times more. We pondered what tragic end our assigned driver could have run into. Was he kidnapped? Shot? Drunk? Perhaps he was just late. So we waited a few minutes, then a few more, finally after about an hour we decided to give the cell phone a try. However, this being a new phone, the battery had not been charged, and I had forgotten to bring my charger. No problem as my boss had a similar cell phone and we would just use her charger. But she, thinking that I would bring mine, decided not to pack hers. Besides the cell phone was displaying a rather troubling message before it would power itself off due to low battery power…it said on it’s screen ‘for emergency use only’. Well that sounded fine to me and a bit reassuring, since I was beginning to consider moving our current situation up a notch from ‘annoying’ towards ‘worrisome’ afterwhich would be ‘very concerned’ and finally ‘emergency’. Perhaps this was a magical sentient phone and knew more than we and was ready to handle things once we realized ‘emergency’ fit the bill. Or perhaps it was an accursed oracle, teasing us with the future in obscure verse. In any case we weren’t too concerned yet, as we had a number to a contact at the plant so we’d just use a pay phone.

Hmm, Strange…the payphones here have no slots for coins or money, and the slot they do have is too thin for credit cards. They failed to respond to anything we did. Not even an operator could be gotten a hold of…

‘Senior, cinco blah blah blah blah’ some woman which had been studying my attempts to use the phone said to me. Feeling empowered by this unlooked for help, I blurted out ‘Ingles?’ She seemed confused and then said ‘No, no Ingles’ and then walked away. Nonplussed, I shrugged my shoulders and went back to the phone problem. She returned a few minutes later and showed me a paper credit card sized card with a picture of Frodo, Sam and Gollum from the Two Towers on it. I took this omen to be a great sign of things to come. I’m in Brazil and Frodo is coming to save me. Or on the other hand perhaps it meant that like Frodo, I’m doomed to fail and lose one of my fingers in the process. She blurted out another string of indecipherable syllables of which I could only make out ‘cinco’. Now my Sesame Street and Electric Company days of my youth served me well as I knew Cinco meant five..but five what? Were there five ruffians around the corner waiting to jump me? Did I had five seconds to get away from the phone before she got violent? Or did she want me to give her five dollars for this admittedly cool looking Lord of the Rings card, Finally she slid the card into the slot on the phone and it dawned on me. Yes Frodo was here to help not hinder in my quest. I nodded, gave her 5 dollars, said ‘Si, Obrigotta’ which due to diligent study of my ‘Learn Portuguese in 7 days book (which I tried to cram into 7 hours on the plane) I knew meant ‘Yes, Thank you’. Well I knew how to write it, who knows if I pronounced it right, I could have told her I like to lick dog feet for all I know, but she did smile and say ‘Ciao’. So either she also liked dog feet or I said it correctly.

Now a step closer to my goal, my boss came back from another search of the area..still no strapping Brazilian lad or sexy Brazilian babe with a sign with our names. I did show her my cool new LotR phone card though. My boss seemed impressed. We put the card in and the display lit up…’40 unidades’ Which, due to my high school latin, I figured translated to ’40 units’. Whether this ‘unit’ meant minutes or calls or some other completely arbitrary and hidden value, I did not know. After several attempts to dial the number, using various combinations of country and area codes, we got a ring. Woo-hoo! Well rather Boo-Hoo cause no one was there and we got an answering machine, which did not let us ‘hit 0′ to reach a company directory or person, but just beeped, waited for a message and hung up.

Unfortunately, this was the only contact we had. We did not have the main number to the company. My boss decided she would leave a message which basically said, “Hello, this is Lauri, we are at the Airport and no one was here to meet us, we have no way for you to call us, so I don’t know what you can do…but we will call back later’ I noticed with discontentment our ‘Unidades’ had descended from 40 to 23 during what was basically a 15 second call…though I did realize it was a call to a plant 250 miles away. Obviously the ‘unit’ didn’t mean ‘calls’….nor did it mean ‘minutes’, it was indeed the hidden and arbitrary value I had feared.

At this point we decided to try some Brazilian coffee. This accomplished two things: Got me wired, and made me realize how shitty American coffee is. Good good stuff. Being totally wired now, I was ready to tackle the challenges ahead with renewed vigor!

We then decided to go to an information booth…and guess what, the guy there (who at the time was talking to a very gorgeous babe’ spoke English. We figured our troubles were over. He told us how to dial the operator. So we did. The ‘guy’ did fail to mention however, that the operators all speak Portuguese and as soon as you say ‘Ingles?’ they hang up on you. Perhaps they thought we were trying to say ‘The English are coming’ and that this was a precursor to an invasion, but after three different attempts the result was the same.

We returned to the information booth..the babe was still there talking to the information guy. He this time had a friend of his go to the phone and speak to the operator for us. All this accomplished was to tell us that the plant was so new, it was not listed in information yet, and the president of the plant also was not listed in Curitiba where he was in the process of moving to. We were fucked. We decided to make the most of it and have more coffee and get more wired. This was easily achieved by basically pointing wildly at a menu board above the counter and nodding our heads when intuition told us the waiter had some clue to what we wanted.

Due to a three hour time difference, nobody would be at work in Grafton for 1 more hour, so we couldn’t call there even if we bought a phone card with enough ‘Unidades’ to let us have more than a 10 second conversation. I searched my entire laptop for past emails sent from the plant hoping one of them would have a letterhead or phone number. Nope. No luck.

Hmm I thought, Sao Paulo is a big city…actually it is a fucking huge city..much bigger than New York..it just goes on forever…and this is what it looked like from the air. Over 20 million people. But it is an ugly, dirty city with quite a bit of smoggish overcast and I did not like it. But it is big, and I figured…they must have an Internet service somewhere in the airport. I could email Grafton, and while we would have to kill a few hours, we certainly could look around and at the very least valiantly further stereotypes concerning stupid Americans in foreign lands.

Like a beacon, I saw a kiosk shining in a golden light (This may have been due to lack of sleep and coffee fixes) but there it was — a touch-screen information kiosk. Now I was in MY element, I deftly navigated the menus and found there was an internet service in the airport. We trekked the 10 minute journey and arrived. On the wall, were hanging cell phone chargers! There was one for our phone. So I bought it and also bought 30 minutes of internet time. I sat down at a computer, logged on and sent several desperate pleas to the person in the know in Grafton, as well as well-veiled letter of suspicion and contempt to our Brazilian contacts, I was now beginning to think they were trying to off us, due to some multinational government conspiracy…but that may have just been the coffee. I also plugged our phone in a power jack by the computer so we could attempt to use it. I felt our situation was close enough to an emergency that the magical sentient phone would do what we need it to. It didn’t. It just didn’t work. Just sat there and blinked ‘Low Battery’ and ‘For emergency use only’. I contemplated trying to pawn it off for a ticket home, but my boss suggested I hold onto to it for a memento or at least to have something to throw at our Brazilian host when we arrive.

With the letters sent, we decided to look around the airport some more and wait.

My boss decided to try and call our Brazilian contact once again. Success!!! We got a person and she spoke ‘Ingles’. My boss asked to speak to Fernando , our host and the plant president. As she said this I watched our ‘Unidades’ on the display quickly drop from 23 to 15 to 10 to 5 to 0. All in the span of about 20 seconds. Call over..please play again. Sigh. This time my boss went to another information booth. this one had no hot babe with guy. She found out about a ‘Telefone’ store. We went to look for and found the ‘telefone’ store where you could get many cool LotR cards with many many ‘Unidades’. This seemed to us a stroke of good fortune, many many’unidades’ meant we could make many many mistakes. We dialed the number again but this time there was no lady to answer…it just rang and rang. My conspiracy theory was beginning to gain momentum. Being far too hopped up on this magical Brazilian coffee to safely risk getting more, we decided to chill for a bit. It was about this time I REALLY began to notice something. Something that my brain had obviously noticed right off, but due to lack of sleep and other concerns hadn’t brought up to the for-front of conscious thought. Something about the women. Something about how they all looked. Something that will probably haunt me for the rest of my days. They are ALL god-damn gorgeous. I swear to god, every chick in this country is tall, thin, wears tight clothes and is to die for. Ok not every one, but the ratio simply can not be described. I am going to start taking pictures cause it’s the only way to convey the sheer number of them. Of course, the best I could hope for is to learn the word for ‘lost’, make a sign, tie it around my neck, and hope one of them lets me follow her home because I can’t get past ‘Hola!’ before it’s clear that communication just isn’t possible without drifting into the seedy underworld of mime-hood. It’s a form of hell. I went to a mall tonight with my boss in Curitiba, it was the same thing. You could fall in love 20 times over. My boss tells me it’s the very same thing for the guys..so she said she would take pictures of guys down there so you would understand. There really aren’t words for it. It’s shocking.

Back to our adventure. We went back to check our email. Linda (our goto-person in Grafton) had come through and had Fernando’s cell phone as well as the company main number. We called and after several attempts somehow managed to hit the right combination of digits and got through. They were very ‘sorry’ for what happened. Obviously now back-pedaling since we were still alive and could be potential witnesses. They said they would straighten it all out with Delta. We just had to go to the Delta office. 30 minutes later and after several misunderstood instructions we found it. Our salvation (A high-ranking Delta rep) seemed quite excited to see us, too bad she couldn’t speak a lick of English. Finally after watching her gesticulate like a rabid stork for several minutes we concluded she would ‘take care of everything’ and that we were to ‘follow her’. Hmmm, ‘Take care of everything’….’Follow her’. I thought perhaps we should really just run and yell ‘Polica! Militia’ but she did seem pretty old and fragile to be able to ‘off us’ so we followed. She spoke in their mysterious secret language to several other people from a different airline, handed us each a ticket to Curitiba, and directed us to a Taxi Cab and said ’25 dollars’. Ok? OK. Good. Ciao!

I looked at my phone and saw it still displaying it’s cryptic prophesy, but was now too tired to care. We got in the taxi and got our first good look of Sao Paulo. I didn’t like it. It was HUGE, not HUGE as in tall building, even though there we enough of those to fill 3 New Yorks, but Huge as in Sprawling. It went on forever, up hills over hills, up mountains, down them, in valleys as far as you could see. And it was all dirty, run down, and depressing. The traffic was insane. The have no concept of ‘lanes’ and people walk along the highways and motorcycles weave in and out between moving cars. It was quite a site. We got to the other airport, and paid the cabbie $25 dollars. Not bad for a 20 minute ride. We got on our plane, got to Curitiba, and was met by Ulyssis. A very very nice gentleman from the plant. Being 6 hours late, tired, and in no mood to now go to the plant for tours, we asked just to be taken to the Hotel.

This is the point, all the bad impressions of Brazil start to give way, and my mood and opinion begin to change. We were given executive suites on the top floor of a 15 story five-star hotel in Downtown Curitiba. I’ve got a balcony outside my living room and bedroom that overlooks the city. The view isn’t that great because there are other tall hotels that block alot of the city, but none-the-less it’s quite wonderful to just sit out there. We went down to the bar, learned the word for beer is ‘Ceveja’, learned they don’t know what ‘Martini’ means, but finally I did get one, and were introduced to some drink that I still couldn’t catch the name of. It consists of a drink glass, filled about 1/8 full with granulated sugar, then half full with quartered limes and then some magical type of liquor that for all the world tastes like Tequila, but isn’t , fills the remaining space. They give you a Popsicle stick that your are to use to smash the limes but NOT to stir the drink..you just let the sugar stay at the bottom. We had about 4 each. At this time it was about 8pm and I was fucking lit. I convinced my boss that we should go out for a walk and see if we could find any monkeys. We had heard they can be found in the city and in my current mindset I thought it a good plan to try and find some to tease and/or feed. Alas, no simians were to be found that night, but we did enjoy a walk of the nearby area. Once again the babe thing was stunning. I’ve never seen anything like it, two words are just TALL, THIN. All of them. Not anorexic type Hollywood thin either, athletic type thin.

Having failed in our quest to find Monkeys we decide to check out the ‘TE’ floor. It was the only floor above ours. Nice. Exercise room, pool, rooftop terrace, masseuse room, and sauna. This place rocks. The only thing that is disconcerting is watching TV. It’s all American TV shows dubbed over in Portuguese. Hearing Gary Coleman telling the man ‘What you talking bout’ in Portuguese just puts me off dinner.

Okay that is all I can write for tonight. I am having a good time here now. It’s quite interesting and very strange at the same time. I’ll write more when I get the chance. Take care all, and tune in next week for our next episode of Brazil – The Series.

—Protagonist #1