One of the first things I learned on my first trip to Brazil, in 1996, was how to make a phone call.

First, you made yourself comfortable. Then, with hope and a prayer, taking a deep breath, you lifted the phone off the hook, and placed the receiver to your ear. You heard nothing, so you hung up. A couple of seconds later, you dutifully tried again, waiting for the dial tone that never came. What else could you do but repeat the procedure once more, twice more, growing increasingly despairing until finally—sometimes hours later—a dial tone deigned to appear? 

Today, the distance between the country in which the above situation took place and the country now is so gaping that the story might have taken place a lifetime ago. Back when phones couldn't be trusted to work and you had to stand in line for hours to pay your water or gas bill, the bedraggled middle classes liked to tell the bitter joke that Brazil always had been, and always would be, the country of the future. Today, amid the realization it may finally be living up to its potential, Brazilians sometimes seem dazed about how quickly their luck has changed.

Brazil occupies half of South America, larger than the lower 48 states. When I accidentally happened into a Portuguese class as a college freshman, I knew that, and not much more, about Brazil. But I loved the language, and my parallel discovery of Brazilian music made learning the language easier than I'd expected.

Two years later, I headed to Rio to study abroad. Before I went, daunted by the vastness of the country, I bought a Brazil Air Pass, which allowed me to visit six cities, from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon to Porto Alegre in the far south. Everywhere I went, I found everything I expected to find. There was no lack of golden beaches, colonial charm, scary rain forests, soccer players, tropical rhythms and chatty hookers. I drank cachaça-based cocktails; I got a tan. 

The things I didn't expect made the deepest impression, and that was not because I was disappointed by Brazil's more famous attractions. The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its mountains plunging into the sea, was as spectacular as advertised, and the waterfalls of Iguaçu did justice to Eleanor Roosevelt's exclamation "Poor Niagara!" The Amazon was enormous; and I could have dangled forever in a hammock in old beachside towns like Olinda or Paraty.

All of those things I more or less expected. I didn't expect to find a gigantic factory in Recife that its owner, the sculptor Francisco Brennand, had spent half a century transforming into a total work of art full of abstract ceramic genitalia. I didn't expect anything like "The Passion According to G.H.," a novel written by a part-time Rio beauty columnist named Clarice Lispector, about a well-to-do lady who, at the height of a mystic crisis, eats a roach.

What ended up bringing me back to Brazil, at least 20 times, were the things that weren't so obvious—including the mysterious Lispector. It was easy to love beautiful Rio, but labyrinthine São Paulo, far less easy on the eye, is an acquired taste; and often, stuck in a traffic jam with a good portion of its 20 million residents, I wondered whether I would ever acquire it. But with patience and the help of friends, I found its unpromising exterior opening to reveal surprising contents.

One friend took me to a monstrous concrete bunker called CEAGESP: inside were stands selling every conceivable produce of Brazil's fields and forests, from orchids and carnivorous plants to fruits I had never heard of, with names like grumixama and jabuticaba. The next day, a door in a dull concrete wall on a dull residential street opened to disclose a magnificent Modernist house by Lina Bo Bardi: I'd never heard of her either.

Once, in Pernambuco, I took a friend's advice to visit the town of Igarassu: reluctantly, because I had driven through Igarassu once and found it—politely put—rather unprepossessing. But I was headed that way, and thought it was worth a try. I tracked down the local museum's custodian, a woman in a tank top and Havaianas. She fished a medieval-looking iron key from her shorts and opened the door to reveal room after room of majestic paintings.

That was how it went all over the country. Every time I thought I had seen something, another door would open and make me realize everything I had missed. But I did get one thing right: Its people's intelligence and creativity were the most obvious things about Brazil, and if the burden of politics and bureaucracy could be lifted—if someone could figure out how to get the phones to work—there was no limit to what the country could become.

Today, when you get off the plane in Brazil, you find a powerful antidote for pessimism. It's not because of the palm trees or the scent of ethanol in the air that Brazil feels different. It's not that the country doesn't still have its problems. It's because if Brazil, with all its enormous challenges, can come this far this fast, there's hope for the rest of us too. 

Source: The Wall Street Journal