Brazilian fever

A friend of mine warned me that I might become infected by the “Brazil fever” when I am here, and at this point in time I did not quite understand what she meant. However, now that we are in Brazil for a little over a week I completely understand what the “Brazil fever” is. Let me try to explain you.

In fact at arrival a lot of things just seem to not match up and run differently compared to Austria. For example in Austria everyone is always in a hurry, immediately pushing the horn on the streets, whereas in Brazil everything is just relaxed. There is way more traffic, but no hurry, everything is easy going. Or paying the bill at a restaurant – in Austria, especially Vienna, the waiters are very likely to be unfriendly and in a rush to get the bill payed. In Brazil everything is easy going and everyone is friendly. The paying process takes much more time that way, but in the end it is more relaxing and enjoyable. Also although the fact that there are queues almost everywhere (to get in the club, to get out the club), no one complains or looks angry. For example, yesterday at the post office: you pick your number, you sit down and you wait. In Austria there are only angry faces if you look around in the post office. Here everyone just waits and eventually has a chat with the one next in line.

So after some time in country at our weekly review meeting everyone said that “time does not longer matter” and “things are more relaxed now” and Bruno from IBM Brazil just smiled. In my opinion he is right, after the initial stress that you go through when being in a new country everything calms down and I (very likely “we” as whole #ibmcsc brazil team) adopted to the Brazilian way of doing things. Which, again, is different to what we are used to, and we all have different cultural backgrounds.

So to really experience Brazil we had to adopt the Brazilian way of doing things and let the Brazilian fever break out through our team…. glad we allowed it to spread.

(Flag (c) Wikipedia)