Kindness of Strangers

I had one goal – one seemingly simple goal — for Saturday: to add new blog posts and photos to our website. We started the day at the front desk of the hostel, and learned that the computers are unavailable on the weekends. Is there anywhere near with WiFi available, we asked? Maybe at the Vasco de Gama Mall (this seafaring hero is so beloved that they even named a shopping center after him), on “the last floor”, where the restaurants are at, we were told.

We hiked a mile down the road with our computer, roasting and basting ourselves with sweat in the midday sun. When we arrived at the mall, we rode the escalators to the top floor, home to the equivalent of a food court, where you can lunch on anything from McDonald’s (always the longest line) to Argentine parrilla. We didn’t see any signs for WiFi, and wondered if this was what he meant by the last floor. We proceeded up to the next floor, a sort of loft area, with fancier restaurants. Was this the last/top floor? But we saw no signs for WiFi, so we went back down the escalators to look for an information booth, and on our way spotted a small Internet kiosk. We could connect to the Internet, but they couldn’t access our USB drive.

At the information booth we learned that there was WiFi in the mall, but that we’d have to “talk to the Clix people.” The woman at the booth motioned towards another kiosk, emblazoned with black and hot pink Xs. Through our sorry attempts at Portuguese, we learned that we’d have to buy some sort of a device at another store before we could set up a subscription with Clix before we could use the WiFi at the mall.

We walked out of the mall, defeated, and stumbled upon another Internet cafe. They, too, did not have WiFi access, nor could they read our USB card. We wandered back out the other side of the mall, stopping at another informational booth. Here, we learned that there was free, public Internet access available at the science center down the road. Bingo!

We found out way towards the modern (and air conditioned) space, which boasted a corral of new Apple computers. And yes, we could transfer our files from the USB card. For free! We ran into some major snags with uploading photos, so only managed to get the posts up.

It took us all day to learn what should have been obvious from the beginning: that any expectations we had about how something functions at home (in this case, WiFi) doesn’t necessarily translate to another culture. We emerged eight hours after our day began, able to accomplish only half of what we had set out to do.

This seems to be par for the course: everything takes twice as long to do half as much as you’d like. Most things we set out to do in a day – from figuring out how to buy a bus ticket to asking for directions to the procurement of food – take eight times longer than we think it will. Even making Top Ramen, the world’s simplest meal, is a major feat. Everything is a multistep process, and we rarely get it right the first time. This is taking some getting used to. We take our habits and routines, our basic orientation to our lives and culture, and our easy access to just about everything for granted. There are times when I just want to sit down and cry, wanting only for the simplest thing to be easy. This has been a week of calibration, of slowly learning to set my expectations low. “Going with the flow” sounds easy in theory. But it’s more complex than just learning to take things as they come. It’s about accepting the fact that everything will take longer and be harder than you think – anything additional is a bonus.