Recently,
I went to Brazil for a combination of reasons including both business and
pleasure. It was a delightful trip for
so many reasons, but perhaps the highlight of the trip was the first night.
My
two (male) friends, J and S, and I, arrived in Rio de Janeiro Airport at about
7pm local time. We collected our bags
without incident and joined the line to get our passports checked out. As part of the process, we had to fill in a
form, which involved information about where we would be staying. For the last three nights, we had a hotel
paid for, but for the first three nights, we had arranged our own hotel through
a website which we will never be using again.
The room looked very nice and very clean, and was fairly reasonable, but
not cheap enough for us to suspect that something might be wrong.
The
first sign that something was up was when a volunteer at the airport who could
speak both Portuguese and English told us that ‘motels’, in Brazil, were where
people usually went to ‘have sex.’ The
second sign something was up was when we had to drive through Favellas and
abandoned houses to get to the motel. On
arriving at ‘Motel Caricia’ we were actually pleasantly surprised that it
wasn’t a broken down building with people inside injecting drugs into their
ears, but at this point, I hadn’t slept in 49 hours so I was just happy to be
able to sit down.
The
motel was designed so that you could pay by the hour to use the rooms, and we
saw a lot of people going in with what were probably prostitutes. We also saw a band go in, and an entire
camera crew for some reason. J and S
were pretty mortified and wanted to get a cab back into town and find a hotel
in Copacabana or Ipanema, but I was insistent that we stay in the seedy sex
hotel because, firstly, we’d already paid for it, and I’d rather be brutally
murdered in my sleep than not use something that I have paid for, and, more
importantly, I thought that we’d actually be safer inside the room than
outside. After a very uncomfortable 45
minutes where a lot of people came in and out, saw us with our suitcases, and
obviously thought we were complete wankers for booking this hotel, we
negotiated our three night stay down to one night, and went up to our room.
The
first thing we were greeted with in the room was what we thought was a room
service menu, but turned out to be a list of dildos and other various sexual
aids that the motel provided:
The entire
bed, including the sheets was covered in some sort of resistant film and the
shower was big enough for about 8 people, should the necessary situation have
arisen. The TV contained mostly porn
channels, which we watched while drinking all the beers in the minibar. As we were watching one particularly graphic
porn channel, the camera zoomed out to reveal the guy playing bass that we had
JUST seen in the lobby an hour earlier, leading us to believe that what we were
watching was, in fact, a live feed from downstairs. S tried to go downstairs to see what was
going on but he was stopped because he wasn’t in a couple. J also ventured outside at one point to get
more beer, and he was, surprisingly, successful.
I
actually got one of the best night’s sleep I’d ever had in that motel, despite
music pounding through the floor and two boys watching porn beside me in our
double bed. When I woke up the next day,
they had drunk about 16 beers; they tried to explain to the guy at the front
desk that they had drunk the beers and needed to pay for them, but they didn’t
seem to understand what J and S were saying.
I suggested that they use a helpful picture to explain the situation:
But
my creativity fell on deaf ears.
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