[kranke155]

Fly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo.

Your understanding of the world is warped by the safety and availability of goods. It's incredible when you get in places where the state doesn't function at let's say 50% of what we get in the first world. It's one hell of a learning experience.

[doodlesdev]

   >  Fly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo.

Better yet, don't.

source: Am Brazilian, would not recommend it.

To be fair, Central São Paulo isn't even what I would consider third world yet, if you really wanna see how good some of us have it go to the northeast of Brazil, or Venezuela (if you manage to get in somehow).

[sbierwagen]

Getting into Venezuela is easy, getting back out again is the hard part.

[marcosdumay]

Central São Paulo isn't all that bad. It's slightly off-center that is really bad.

And no, you will only find similar stuff at Rio de Janeiro. Fortaleza and Recife have small areas that come close, but the real bad of urban violence is on the southeast.

[zubiaur]

In the grand scheme of things, even rural-ish northeast Brazil is not thaaat bad. Venezuela though... oh boy.

[kranke155]

The northeast is amazing. I wanted to give a simple example.

[gota]

I don't understand this. Sao Paulo is mostly indistinguishable from any large city in the US. Big concrete-and-glass buildings city centre, lots of traffic-related infrastructure, large swaths of residential areas including richer suburbs and poorer ghettos ('favelas', in Brazil). Are there any large cities that do not conform to this formula?

What are you referring to, specifically?

The only thing that comes to mind are the homeless population, but then again you could say the same problem (and at arguably larger scale) afflicts San Francisco or New York.

Sao Paulo is not even particularly violent, too

[elzbardico]

Downtown São Paulo, or the central zone is a decadent part of the city (think Bronx in 70s). It is overrun with Cracolândia (big gathering of crack addict homeless people). Most foreign people or even Brazilians that go to São Paulo stay only at the nice zones.

[bsimpson]

I was recently in northern Vietnam. You could spend an hour having a simple conversation via Google Translate.

Made me realize there are still big chunks of the world where you can't take basic literacy for granted in 2023, even of people in their 30s.

[marc_abonce]

Sorry but I don't understand how does the first sentence in your post relates to the second one.

To me it reads like you didn't know the local language but they're the illiterate ones for not knowing your language? Or did I completely misunderstood your story?

[mrguyorama]

50% of Americans cannot read at a highschool level.

[KMnO4]

Still a lot, but 22% of Americans are children

[dsfyu404ed]

Are they measuring "reading ability for the real world" or are we talking "analyze any interpret fiction literature" type reading skills? Serious question. Because I feel like "real world reading" stopped after about 8th, maybe 9th grade and everything else was just fluff.

[jhugo]

Google Translate is really, really, really bad for Vietnamese, so they were probably having trouble understanding the mutilated Vietnamese it was spitting out, more than anything.

I assume you didn't mean to imply that "basic literacy" == "knowing English", but your post does somewhat come across that way.