The guy in the front seat hadn’t said a word more than “hello” in an hour. It was starting to weird me out. The other three of us had been bantering excitedly the whole time in anticipation of five days in the country side, and I couldn’t stop wondering why the guy was so damn quiet. I had tried to get him involved with the chatter, but I forgot his name the moment he told me, so I gave up.

During a brief silence he burst up from a slouch and started yelling.

“When I lived in Canada I dated a Korean girl named Boo-mi! Boo-mi!” he said, laughing as if it was the craziest thing in the world. I shared dumbfounded looks with the other guy in the back seat. He continued shouting. “I always used to say Boo-mi! Boo-mi! Can I finish in your face Boo-mi? She never knew what I meant, so I did it anyway! Ha ha, on your face Boo-mi!” No one knew how to respond aside from laughing, and he returned to his silence.

We were leading a caravan of four cars a couple hours outside of Saõ Paulo to spend Carnival in a tiny farm town that was known for filling up with tens of thousands of hillbillies and city folk alike. Another four or five cars had left earlier that day. In all we were going to cram 30 men and women into a two-bedroom farm house. At least it was supposed to have a pool.

Because we were arriving late and Carnival hadn’t technically started yet, the general consensus amongst our cars was that we’d take the first night relatively easy. We got to the town easily, but no one knew how to get to our house. One of the guys already there had offered to drive out to meet us and lead us back. Rodrigo, our driver, gave him a call. I couldn’t hear clearly, but it sounded like gibberish on the other end of the line. Then it abruptly went dead. Rodrigo tried calling a few more times, but no one answered. No one else could get through.

We waited for an hour. Groups of wildly inebriated people wandered up and down the street in both directions, singing loudly. One guy in a group of 12 walked up through the group, grabbing every girl’s ass, then turned around and walked back down the line trying to steal kisses. He repeated this a few times until he saw us watching him, and took off his shirt and ran down the street singing.

Finally a car came screeching up. Japa, the guy we had been calling, tumbled out of the driver’s seat with two beers in his hand. He was screamingly drunk, and ran in circles yelling and hugging everyone he could find. One beer tumbled onto the ground. The other tumbled into his mouth. A cute girl had suddenly appeared behind the wheel in his car and I wandered over to talk to her.

“Hey, let me drive. I’m good. I swear,” I said.

“No way,” she responded bluntly. She turned up the early-2000′s junior high girl pop punk that was on the radio and had a long pull off the tall can in her hand. A cop drove past.

“Don’t you think it’s unsafe to drink and drive?” I asked in a mock-chiding way.

“What? Are you kidding me?” She burst into laughter. “This is Brazil.”

We took off, flying down the street. People hung out of the car windows yelling at each other. We left the town and continued out into the middle of nowhere. We passed a bar next to a church. There was a huge crowd of people, most wearing leather, in the street and what sounded like a Brazilian metal band was playing on a small stage. We passed another church surrounded by fields.

The train of cars bumped over some railroad tracks and down a gravel road. When we pulled into the house, a big crowd was already yelling over the music and throwing out “I love you man!” hugs left and right. After giving yelled hellos to the guys I knew and doing the awkward hug-and-kiss that I don’t think I’ll ever master with a surprising number of pretty girls, I grabbed a beer out of a huge wheezing freezer still half-full with well over a hundred cans and sat down for a card game whose name translated is “little fuck.” We alternated between handing out beers and shots of a cane liquor called Jamel to the losers of each hand. The Jamel had a picture of a camel on the label, so I figured it was swanky, but I later found out it goes for $1.50 a liter in the favela. Little Fuck is a game based upon guessing how many tricks you’ll win each hand, and gets progressively harder with more people. With 15 people at the table, playing drunk and loose, a lot of drinks got passed around. A few hours flew by. The table was continually smacked, one obscenity or another was constantly flying through the air, and a mountain of empty cans and bottles slowly engulfed a pitifully small trashcan that hadn’t a chance when it was assigned its job.