This is Part 2 of a story posted March 20. To read Part 1, please click on the link below.
There was no direct flight to Rio from Chicago, so my departure routine was no different than usual until I boarded my connecting flight in Houston. The flight attendants did their pre-flight safety demonstration then paused for a few seconds before going through it again in Portuguese. That’s when the realization kicked in that this wasn’t going to be a normal trip. The second clue was my fellow passengers.
I was surrounded by Brazilians on all sides, in every shade from deep chocolate to a cup of coffee with two creams, chatting away in their native tongue. It was an unusual but not uncomfortable feeling to be an outsider. Despite the language barrier, I was struck by the normalcy of the scene. Parents swaddled and shushed babies to settle them down, young people helped senior citizens stow their bags in the overhead bins, and a businessman next to me stared intently into a spreadsheet on his laptop. The very same activities I’d seen a million times on domestic flights in America. It was the first of many examples to come showing me that the world might be a big place but human nature is universal.
The 10-hour flight was uneventful, and I passed it reading books and sleeping when I wasn’t eating Continental’s warmed over version of Brazilian food. Normally, I prefer to sit on the aisle so that I can get up at will, but this was one of the rare occasions I requested the window. As we were coming in for a landing at the Rio airport, I was glad I did. Having flown overnight, the sun was coming up, illuminating the beaches and green hillsides of the city. That butterfly feeling welled up in my stomach again knowing the pictures I’d looked up weeks ago were about to come to life. Before I could get there, though, I had to take care of a few clerical issues.
While international travel sounds glamorous – and it can be- the aspect no one mentions to a first-time traveler is the tedium that undergirds it. Most of the conversations are about restaurants or museums you should visit. But not a single person told me to pack a pen to fill out paperwork. When the cabin crew handed out customs and immigration forms, I helplessly watched my more seasoned seatmates unholster passports from their carrying cases and brandish ballpoint pens. They filled out the forms within seconds and went back to watching movies on the seat-back screens. I was too embarrassed to ask to borrow a pen, figuring I’d find one in the airport.
Once we deplaned, I wasn’t prepared for the mad dash through the terminal. Even families with strollers passed me in a speed walk/light jog hoping to secure a preferred spot in the immigration line. I strolled through the airport casually, taking in the sights. The Coca-Cola and Deloitte ads in Portuguese. Candies I didn’t recognize in the convenience stores. All the children in yellow and green soccer jerseys.
The immigration center was a maze of nylon ropes hooked together by metal stanchions forming three separate lines. I found an old table in the back of the room with a pen attached to it by a metal string and filled out my forms. After reading the overhead signs three times for good measure, I went to the back of one of the lines, hoping it was the correct one. The soldiers patrolling the area in fatigues with long guns gave me extra urgency to get it right.
When I had inched my way to the front of the queue after a 30 minute wait, the officer at the counter barked something out to me in Portuguese. Realizing I didn’t understand, he switched to English and told me I needed to stand behind the yellow line until called.
I chalked it up to one of those travel rules you don’t know about until you’ve been through it one time. Mental note: 1. Bring pen, 2. Stand behind yellow line, 3. Run (maybe) when you get off plane.
When the immigration officer called me forward, he asked for my passport and landing card. As he scanned my passport, he gave me a thorough once over.
“What is the reason for your visit?” he asked with an accusatory tone in his voice.
“Vacation,” I stumbled after thinking about it for what felt like an hour but was probably just a second in real time. One more item for the list of things no one tells you. I was so taken aback by his questioning I probably came across like I was lying. Mental note: 4. Have your reason ready and say it with conviction.
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
He flipped through all the pages of my pristine passport and gave me one more quizzical look before stamping it and waving me through. I felt like I had just made it past the bouncer at the toughest nightclub in town.
I passed through a set of double doors to the baggage claim area and collected my suitcase. The customs officer at the exit gave me the same look as his immigration counterpart and told me to put my suitcase on the table for inspection. I was instructed to stand back while he rifled through my sneakers and t-shirts. I had a distinct suspicion that something about me was setting off alarm bells, but there was nothing I could do about it. Satisfied that my bag was clear, the officer zipped up my suitcase and waved me through another set of double doors. I was finally in Brazil.
The terminal felt like walking into a carnival. There were people everywhere aggressively trying to get my attention. One man grabbed me by the arm and told me he had the best discounts for tourist attractions in the city. Another two asked if I needed a taxi and would have grabbed my bags had I not stopped them. When I looked up and saw a driver holding a sign with my name printed on it, I was so glad I had arranged it ahead of time. Of all the warnings about Brazil on the State Department website, the one about not taking unsolicited rides turned out to be sound advice.
I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to be kidnapped, but my driver had his own sales pitch ready once we got into the car. He gave me his card and told me he could take me to the prettiest girls in Rio. Totally safe for Americans. I didn’t fully understand what he meant by that last comment, but it became very clear over the next few days.
Whenever I visited a new American city, my modus operandi was to get lost and eventually find my way back to the hotel. I avoided guidebooks and tourist destinations in favor of serendipity. I quickly discovered Rio was not the best place to take that approach. The hotel clerk advised me to stick to the beach areas and to especially avoid going up into the hills to the favelas. The brightly colored slums and shanties were Rio’s way of literally putting a pretty coat of paint over poverty. An American walking through one unaccompanied would be a guaranteed mark.
Even with those constraints, I walked around Copacabana and Ipanema with no problems. In fact, many of the people I passed on the street were almost deferential to me. I soon found out why. A waiter at a boardwalk restaurant where I stopped for lunch asked if I was militar. I didn’t understand what he meant until he made the gun signal with his hand. At the time, I wore my hair in a short Caesar style with a thin moustache. He told me it was very similar to the way Brazilian soldiers (militar) groomed themselves, which explained the wide berth so many people gave me on the street.
Once night fell, however, the atmosphere changed. When I asked the clerk at the front desk to recommend a nightclub with good music, he directed me to Help Discoteca on the beach. With the name Discoteca, I assumed it was a typical dance club. It was anything but. Help was a huge building on Avenue Atlântica in Copacabana. But when I arrived, I was ushered into a small room to the left of the entrance. It was a circular space with seating lining the walls and an elevated stage in the middle of the room with a wooden stool on it. It struck me as strange that there were several other men already seated in the room but no women except for the waitresses.
In a few minutes, the lights went down and a spotlight lit up the stage. Shortly after, a man walked into the room completely naked except for a black leather mask covering his face. Moments later, a woman appeared from the same direction, also naked but with her face uncovered, and walked to the stage. The man in the mask bent her over the stool and commenced intimate activities typically conducted behind closed doors.
A few dozen women then flooded the room and paired up with the men sitting on the couches lining the wall. The one who walked over to me was rubbing my hair and asked if I wanted company. It was at this point that I finally understood what was happening. The stage show was just the warmup act for the working girls to find their johns for the night. I politely declined and made my way back to the hotel.
The next night I was determined to have a much quieter evening. I grabbed my camera out of the hotel safe and walked to the water to have a more touristy experience after what had happened yesterday. A full moon reflected off the ocean waves and made for a great picture. I hadn’t noticed the group of women in miniskirts about 20 yards from me. One must have thought I was taking a picture of her and said something to a man lingering nearby. He started yelling and walking toward me briskly. Even without a translator, I still knew he had no good intentions, so I walked just as briskly in the opposite direction until I spotted a real militar.
The morning of my return flight, I was packing my suitcase and reflected on all that had happened the previous few days. I’d heard some great music, saw beautiful art and the Christ the Redeemer statue. I met interesting people from all over the world. But, I’d also been mobbed by con men at the airport hoping to take advantage of me, unwittingly walked into a live sex show at a brothel and been propositioned by prostitutes, and was chased by a Brazilian pimp thinking I was horning in on his territory. To top it off, I realized all the mean mugging from the guys at the airport was because they assumed I had come for sex tourism, like most of the foreign men I had run into. All I could do was smile. For a first trip, it probably could have gone smoother, but it wouldn’t have been as rewarding. I was faced with challenging situations and found a way to deal with them.
I actually look back fondly on that time. Now that I’ve visited about 40 countries and gone through a couple of passports, I know I’m never going to get those butterflies in my stomach again like the first time I stepped off a plane outside US soil. Those ads on the wall in a foreign language for cars and colas I’ve never heard of aren’t quite as interesting as they used to be.
You trade in your naivete for experience, your callowness for competence, but it comes at the expense of excitement. That sense of wonder you feel when everything is new gets harder to come by.
Sometimes I wish I could be that kid again who didn’t know to stand behind the yellow line.