Of Homesickness and Cultural Shocks

Now, it has been over a week since I was down, and the strange sad feeling is completely gone, so I will write about it.

It was last friday, my sisters birthday and other than that a normal day at work. I spent the lunch break at the hotel, so I can call my sister over skype cause I knew she would be preparing her party at my parents house.
We talked for a while and I wished her a happy birthday and a great party, and then I went back to work.

When I arrived back at work I was told that I had a meeting at 14h (it was around 13.55h) which was important cause it was about what I was working on.
Now, first I thought "how nice they plan this without letting me know" and then I thought about the project I was working on which was generally really easy (calculating a marketshare per product per each salesman) but turned out to be really annoying as the two databases that give the information work completely different and make it really hard to combine product and market into one (different languages for example, or different spelling).
In the meeting we wanted to go over the steps needed to calculate it all into one format, as I had had a couple of questions in the morning, however, all I ever heard was "it is all easy" because I was simply not able to explain the problem I had in portugese and they could not understand me in english. I felt like I was running against a wall and their repetition of "don't worry its so easy" and "you know, it's new for us too, the databases are very new" made me go crazy.
The meeting ended and i wasn't any smarter than before, so I decided to just do it as far as I thought it was reasonable and not changing the results too much (due to too much calculation needed to make the databases comparable).

Later however, my colleague came again over to my place to explain me again what they needed. I had understood what they needed from the beginning so I told him I understood, just had one question. We started all over again but reached the same problem: language. I was so frustrated you cannot believe it.
I got angry at myself for not being able to make myself understood, angry at whomever decided to have two databases with basically the same data but with different names and spelling, and angry at the world around me, cause they did not seem to care that this way they would get results but they would be unable to tell anything worth the analysis and insane excel programming needed to get there. And probably they would even be far off reality cause they would be taken out of context, mixed and brought back together. I tried to stay calm, but after the 100th time of "don't worry, it's all easy, you just need to divide the forecasted sales through the forecasted market" I just couldnt stand it anymore. Out of a sudden and without myself having any control over my brain, I had this rush of thoughts...

"What am I doing here? Why am i 27 hours of travelling from home? What was I thinking, I cannot even explain anything in this language?! Why am I not home helping to prepare my little sisters big birthday bash? Why didn't I chose any place in this world that is more like home? Canada, Spain, Germany, anything... but I chose Brasil?! Those people are crazy and dont even speak a little bit of english! I don't even have a home here yet... 6 weeks in hotels for that?! I wanna go home. Now."

I knew I had to finish until Monday and it was Friday, 17:45h so I decided to run. Well, as far as I could: Across the street into my hotel room. I saved the excel file and all the background data on a usb flash stick and left. I thought I could finish it in the hotel on my computer, afterall, excel 2007 is way easier for stuff like that anyways.
When I came home to the hotel, I was really really sad. Heavyness and an unexplainable sad feeling was nagging on me and I really did not know how to cope with it. I had never experienced a Cultural Shock and with homesickness I had never really had a Problem. In Canada I was homesick only twice that I really remember: One on the 2nd day, which had passed after 20 minutes of crying and then going outside to play with my little host sisters; and once more on September 11th (my first day of High School) when people talked about a third world war, which had passed after calling my parents and a mean joke of my little sister (Grandma: "Maybe we should get her home..." Sis: "Grandma... with the plane?!").
But this here in Brasil, this was different. It felt like I had made a huge mistake by coming here, and I really cried. If my red ballerinas weren't in the container, I would have slipped them on and clacked the heels to see if I could get home like in the Wizard of Oz... I tried on skype and on the phone, but of course, on a Friday night at 23h in Germany nobody was reachable. And my sisters party I didnt want to call, cause I would have cried and ruined the mood...
So I had a beer, watched a movie and went to bed early. It helped too.

On sunday I plugged in the flash drive to start working. But the file was corrupted. I sent it to Amber to see if she could open it, but she couldn't either... I could have thrown the damn thing out of the window, but that's not really me, so I just turned of the TV and went shopping instead. For the first time driving with my car around.
I chose a shopping center that is not too complicated to reach and though my car (an old Volkswagen Passat (or Parati in Brasil)) is old and dirty and I needed to get used to it first: It drives well and probably noone will have the idea of stealing it...
As I had heard a couple of horrendous stories of driving in Goiânia ("worse than Sao Paulo") I was prepared for hell. Turned out though, compared to Madrid it is a joke ;) Well, it is about the same as in Madrid but with less traffic which makes it a lot easier. I reached the Shopping Center without problems and thought it was funny that in Madrid my biggest ever shock was driving in the city and not really knowing where to go, and now here that was no problem (thanks to Madrid) but the language was (which, in Spain, had never be a problem of this extreme).

On Monday I got to the office early and had only a tiny lunch break, but I managed to finish the damn excel file and people were happy.
That was it. My first homesickness in years and my first real cultural shock. Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to Brazil!