Rio

If you just want the highlights, see the video at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, read on…

When Afton was working on her class schedule for high school a couple of years ago, and I saw that a Portuguese class was being offered, I bribed her into taking it by telling her I’d taker her to Brazil if she did.

The bribe worked, but unfortunately it was the beginning of the pandemic, which had a couple of effects:

1. We weren’t going to Brazil any time soon
2. Her teacher was pretty checked out, so the learning experience wasn’t ideal

Aside from bribery, I also had a desire to go back to the country where I had served my mission. Dad and Cathy came to travel the country with me when my mission finished, so I had been to a lot of places, but that was back in 1988, and I hadn’t been back since.

So back in the spring I got plane tickets to Rio de Janeiro for Afton, Shannon, Ethan and I. Gerrit and Macy thought that with school and jobs it would be a hard time to get away, unfortunately. We went over Afton’s fall break, so she missed a little less school than she would have otherwise.

Rio vs. São Paulo

Since I served in São Paulo, why go to Rio de Janeiro? Nicknamed “the marvelous city”, Rio is beautiful, and has a lot for tourists to do. To my family I said, “Imagine if there were a city built in Zion National Park, except the rocks are black instead of red, there is forest everywhere, and it is on the beach.”

For a while I did consider trying to make it to a city in the state of São Paulo in which I had served. If we had decided to spend some time in the city of Paraty, it would have only been a couple more hours driving to get there. In the end, the planning was a bit too much for me, so we stuck around in the city of Rio the whole time.

Language

A large source of anxiety leading up to the trip was being able to speak and understand Portuguese. After living in Brazil for some 20 months, getting a minor in Portuguese at BYU, and trying to keep a bit of language study going over the years, I hoped my skills weren’t in too bad of shape. But that was a long time ago, and watching Brazilian shows on Netflix, I missed a lot of what was being said if I was just listening. With Portuguese subtitles I’d have vocabulary holes (which I’d add to my flashcard deck), but could generally follow along.

So how did it go?

It was definitely mixed. In the hotel, I could have spoken English the whole time — most of the staff spoke English to some level of proficiency — but what’s the fun in that? And as a Turkish neurosurgeon we met at a cooking class commented, Brazil has the fewest English speakers of any country he’s been to, second only to China.

So there were some awkward exchanges — I messed up the gender of words, conjugated poorly, mispronounced things, should have said something different entirely, misunderstood questions the first time, and on and on.

But I did have several people say that I spoke Portuguese well. Meaning, they could actually understand me, not that I would be mistaken for a native. There was one Uber driver who asked if we were tourists from somewhere else in Brazil, but I hadn’t said very much prior to that question. One Uber driver (a woman originally from São Paulo) said my Portuguese was “passable”, which was probably the most honest assessment. A lot of people were surprised that an American could make it past bom dia and obrigado, and having the name Eric (which they pronounce EH-ri-kee) show up on reservations tipped people off that I was a foreigner.

While visiting the botanical gardens I saw a British family whose dad could only tap something into Google Translate and show the phone to someone to be able to communicate. Compared to that I felt fantastic in my abilities.

When a guide spoke some English, our conversations would be a mix of English and Portuguese, with Shannon throwing in a little Spanish. There was a waitress who spoke only a few words of English, but thought it pointless to speak Portuguese to me assuming I wouldn’t understand. And well, I guess the rest of the family wouldn’t, so whatever. And she basically told us what to order, and we ended up with an absolute mountain of food that would have fed our family twice over.

Economics

So was that waitress just trying to get us to spend more than we would have? Who knows, but a steak dinner for potentially 8 (!) people at a place with live music, for just over $70 USD? I felt worse about not having a practical way to take the left-overs than how much it cost.

Uber, the main way we got around was ridiculously cheap. A 20 minute drive was around $3 USD, including a tip. And speaking of tips, Brazil doesn’t have the out-of-control tipping culture we have in the US, where you’re routinely prompted to tip 20% for someone to take your order at the counter. A couple of the restaurants we ate at automatically added their own tip, but it was only 10%. Otherwise a tip wasn’t even really expected.

The Sheraton hotel we stayed at, on the other hand, was the only thing with which I felt uncomfortable with the cost. It was fantastic and beautiful, but it cost more than the hotel we stayed at last year a half a block from Times Square in New York City. But any other time something seemed a little spendy, I just thought, “I’m helping Brazil’s economy in a tiny way.”

The Brazilians understand that although salaries are much higher in the US, the cost of living is also much higher. The one thing that was surprising to some people was that we don’t have some kind of maid/housekeeper. Labor is so cheap in Brazil that most middle-class families do.

Church

Afton and I did some baptisms at the Rio temple, and we all made it to sacrament meeting Sunday morning at the Jardim Botânico Ward. As we entered the chapel, the ward members were joyfully greeting each other with abraços and beijinhos (hugs and kisses). I don’t think it is an exaggeration that I shook hands with 10 people before we made it to a seat, and several people came by to greet us after we were seated as well. And being an American family was not much of a novelty — they even had a simple English translation service for the meeting. It touched my heart, and also made me feel like we could do better at making people feel welcome at our meetings here in Utah.

It was the primary program sacrament meeting, and they pulled it off well with only about 7 or 8 kids in the primary. The primary president is a sister from Utah, and her young son sang a solo in English, but sang in Portuguese for all of the other songs. The father of the family is working in Brazil for the US patent office on a 3 year assignment.

Wrap up

The trip was great. The overnight flights there and back were hard on the body, but totally worth it to me. We didn’t get robbed or feel threatened (though there was a totally packed street party we had intended to visit to hear some samba that we didn’t stick around for). I might have liked a couple more clear days as most were cloudy, but even cloudy it was in the 70s, which is much nicer than the 15 degree apparent temperature here in Lehi when I started writing this.

Our kayaking guide said to me, “Eric, why don’t you come back and live in Brazil again?” And after a pause he added, “In fact, I think you will someday.” Who knows? But I can easily imagine another visit.

Video credits…

• Music by Melim
• Alexandre – Kayaking guide
• Flávio – Cooking instructor
• Gabriel – Surfing instructor
• Rafael – Tijuca National Park guide