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A couple of stories from my times here.
One concerns a incident that my friends from Nova Scotia had in Rio. As they were walking down Rio 's main street one day someone tried to yank the watch right off the wife's hand. She was able to wrestle it back before he ran off but the strap was broken and her wrist was sore for quite awhile. It was not an expensive watch so the thief would have been disappointed.
The second story occurred one day at my hotel in Sao Paulo. My card wasn't working (the reason not important to this story) so I had to go to the front desk. At the desk was a Japanese gentleman trying to find out where to get a Calling card. During the check out/check in period it is staffed with people that can speak English enough to do routine duties. On the night in question, none of those people were on duty and the gentleman was getting extremely frustrated as were the clerk and security guy. When I got there he was using very good English so I knew what he wanted and amazing knew enough of the city to give him directions and instructions on what to do. I later found out he was a Doctor from France who was born and raised in Japan and took part of his medical training in the States. He had gotten nowhere with French so he tried English which is where I entered in.
So what do all these stories have in common. This!
In two years, Brazil plays host to the World Cup with 12 cities hosting games. And I'm not sure the country is ready for it.
It is reasonably safe here but that is not the case in Rio. And no city has a good tourist base for the hordes that will be descending upon them. Only 5% of the country has any English and other languages are less than that.
Now I know that North America has not developed an appreciation for boredom ("futbol" fans need not send hate mail - I already know what you want to say) so tourism from North America will be small but the closest thing to an intermediary language is English.
The games themselves will go off fine but the overall experience for visitors will lessened by the language difficulties. This is a country that has enormous tourist potential but there is still a lot of improvement needed to realize the potential. The hotels generally are good but beyond that, everything from restaurants to cabs to even tourism officials, other languages are virtually non-existent.
Talk is that the security problem will be solved by working deals with the gangs. That might work but there is nothing that can be done about the language problem in less than two years. That will require at least a generation.
And I'm being optimistic that somebody realizes how onerous the current Visa system is and changes it before then. I know about a dozen people that were thinking of coming that gave up in the Visa process.
In many aspects, Brazil is the equal of anyplace in the world and it has the population and resources to become a major player. But it will all depend on the educational system. In the end, it always seems to boil down to education.
Addendum: An easy way to kill a couple of hours here is to try and figure out how to access the Internet. It is free but the steps and forms you have to fill in are ridiculous. It wouldn't accept my real information for some reason so eventually I just made stuff up.
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