After a bus ticket sellout, a breakdown, a lot of traffic, and some shitty directions – whoever had the idea of naming one portion of a street after a husband and the other after the wife but using only the last name on the street signs is a fucking idiot – Sam and I showed up to our hostel a day late. We’d told Victor, a friend who’d stayed with us the week prior in São Paulo, to grab us a couple spots. Something had gotten lost in translation with the Kenyan owners, and they said they’d given the bed we’d paid for away. It took a half-hour of arguing in broken English and Portuguese before they found us space in a tiny six person room.

Our roommates were a pair of Brits that had just finished college, a 27 year old Finn who spent all his time playing online poker, and a cute Brazilian photographer. The three guys were already drinking some beers they’d been forced to smuggle in due to the hostel’s strange no beer (but anything else) rule. Victor stopped by to introduce us to a German named Ingo that he’d been traveling with. Ingo was wearing a shiny black shirt and white linen pants. He was ready to party, and a few lukewarm beers weren’t going to cut it.

On the way to the liquor store I tried calling an old student who was in Rio filming a movie. I hadn’t talked to her since she had trick dosed me with acid and taken me into the favela to shoot photos a few months earlier, but she said she wanted to take us to a club where her friend was djing. She also mentioned that she had a bunch of acid again, which I wasn’t the least bit interested in.

Sam explained who I was talking with to the other guys. After I got off the phone Ingo grabbed me. “So man, you got LSD?”

“Well, not exactly…” I started.

“Let’s drop it right now! Come on, it’s been a few months for me! Let’s take it and go find some place that plays some fucking house. I need some bass. Victor, you in or what?”

“Um, no. I don’t think so.” Ingo was a tall, quite excitable dude, and although Victor was probably bigger he just shied away as the German did some Ibiza dance in his face. Ingo bounced back over to me acting like I’d shove a tab in his face right then and there, so I pushed him away with a noncommittal lie that I’d see what I could do.

At the store Ingo ran off to buy fruit, sugar and fancy cachaça to give making caipirinhas a shot. Sam and I bought gutrot and a packet of Tang powder to make sucão, the ‘big juice’ that some high schoolers had introduced us to months earlier. Back at the hostel, Sam spent all of twenty seconds whipping up a neon orange bottle of death while Ingo gathered a couple of the Evangelical girls who were staying there to show off his drinking making technique. They weren’t impressed.

Neither were a couple of guys from São Paulo who were drinking beers in a corner of the hostel’s patio. I offered them some sucão, which they rejected with a laugh. Pointing at Ingo trying to mash two halves of lime with a soup ladle, Marcello said he’d drink whatever shit I was holding before messing with Ingo’s cocktail. Ingo covered the gently battered fruit with a half-cup of sugar and a quarter bottle of cachaça before passing it off to the Brits.

Andy, the more talkative one, grimaced a bit. “Shit, that’s bloody strong.” Ingo looked earnestly for a fuller review, so Andy took another slow swallow. “Not bad though, I suppose it gets the job done.” He passed it to Charlie, who took a tiny sip and sent the cup on its way.

“I’m going to have to show this guy how to really make one before he makes the whole room sick,” Marcello said in Portuguese. “These Germans never do understand how one works.” I assumed he was talking about South Brazil, whose population is mostly descended from Germany, but he continued on. “You ever hear of this bar Ze Presidente in Vila Madalena. There’s always a bunch of damn German tourists there ordering ‘kaprinnas’ and complaining.”