When I was sixteen, I enrolled in AFS’s foreign exchange program to spend a year studying overseas. I asked to go to Australia or England and AFS came back with “How about Brazil?” I thought, “I don’t speak any Spanish, but when am I going to get another chance to see Africa?” So, I said yes.

I quickly learned that Brazil was actually in South America and Brazilians spoke Portugeuse, but my reasoning worked for those variables too. I prepared myself as best I could - which in 1987 meant borrowing some “learn Portuguese” tapes from the library and having a single conversation with my father’s Portugeuse coworker that mostly revolved around the pronunciation of the ‘ao’ ligature with the tilde over it. (He told me it was like the sound a dog makes, ‘ao ao.’)

At some point, I was informed by my school that my year of Brazilian high school would not count towards a New York State regents diploma and that I would have to “repeat” the 11th grade when I got back. For some reason, this didn’t bother me or my parents at the time, but it would be the key to much mayhem.

Along with another American teenage, I was placed in a small city called Juiz de Fora in the state of Minas Gerais, which is reputationally the West Virginia of Brazil. Our orientation was handled by three former exchange students who, I would later learn, had stepped in at the last minute to help because AFS’s official chapter in JdF shut down just before we arrived.

My host family were nice enough people most of the time, but we never really got on. Growing up among the Sicilian-American half of my family, I’d seen the dynamic of a domineering son and an overaccomodating mother plenty of times and those were the parts of the family I tended to avoid when possible. They also had no idea what to do with me. I was a willing participant in sports, but not particularly fit. Instead, half of what I’d packed for a year were novels I wanted to read and, after a few weeks I’d finished those and went scouring the city for more.

The only thing my host brother and I had in common was an appreciation for Brazilian girls. But, I didn’t like the way he treated them and was, as a result, a terrible wingman.

School started and it was stultifying boring. Imagine a dull parochial school teaching rote learning and add the element of it being taught in a language you barely understood at all and it was a recipe for somnolence. Worse, two hours a day were religious instruction and I’d been an atheist since the age of ten. The one redeeming highlight of each day was the hour of English that pretty much every Brazilian high schooler took. So, the day was broken up into things I couldn’t understand, but wanted to, things I couldn’t understand and didn’t care to, and things I understood perfectly, but which were expressed at the level of third-year foreign language students.

One thing I had going for me was that I was a novelty. Americans really don’t go to Juiz de Fora. This gave me a popularity I’d never experienced back home. For the first time, girls were interested in me almost as much as I was interested in them. Their families even liked me! Roughly a month into the school year, a girl invited me to come to Rio with her and her family for the weekend. We got back late Sunday night and I decided to skip school Monday, instead spending the day exploring the city. Tuesday, I decided I’d had so much fun doing that, I would extend the weekend one more day. By Thursday, I’d decided to see how long I could keep not showing up before someone contacted my host family and insisted I come back. It would turn out to be the entire year.

From that point on, I wandered the city, met people (mostly girls, ) and accepted more invitations to travel the country. Nominally, AFS exchange students aren’t supposed to leave the state they’re hosted in without notifying their local AFS chapter and getting their parents’ written permission, but there was no local chapter to enforce this rule. The trips got longer and more varied. I visited the gold fields of Santa Catarina do Norte and the interior of Minas Gerais. I attended an anti-nuclear protest and had dogs sicced on me. I was inducted into the joys of LSD. I even flew to the Ivory Coast for a week, but that’s another story all together.