"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

center said they would help me with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy
Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many
words I didn't know and couldn't pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all
the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it was still at the level that I could
read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the
pronunciations absolutely right: the "de" should be in between "deh" and "day" ­­ it had
to be just so.
I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a
chemist, got up and gave his talk ­­ in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I
couldn't understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe
everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don't know. Then the
next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English!
When it was my turn, I got up and said, "I'm sorry; I hadn't realized that the
official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did
not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I'm going to have to give it in
Portuguese."
So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it.
The next guy to get up said, "Following the example of my colleague from the
United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese." So, for all I know, I changed the
tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I
had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an
impression on them.
But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it all the
time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures in Portuguese ­­
what I call "Feynman's Portuguese," which I knew couldn't be the same as real
Portuguese, because I could understand what I was saying, while I couldn't understand
what the people in the street were saying.
Because I liked it so much that first time in Brazil, I went again a year later, this
time for ten months. This time I lectured at the University of Rio, which was supposed to
pay me, but they never did, so the center kept giving me the money I was supposed to get
from the university.
I finally ended up staying in a hotel right on the beach at Copacabana, called the
Miramar. For a while I had a room on the thirteenth floor, where I could look out the
window at the ocean and watch the girls on the beach.
It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and the stewardesses
from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would "lay over" ­­ a term that always
bothered me a little bit. Their rooms were always on the fourth floor, and late at night
there would often be a certain amount of sheepish sneaking up and down in the elevator.
One time I went away for a few weeks on a trip, and when I came back the
manager told me he had to book my room to somebody else, since it was the last
available empty room, and that he had moved my stuff to a new room.
It was a room right over the kitchen, that people usually didn't stay in very long.
The manager must have figured that I was the only guy who could see the advantages of
that room sufficiently clearly that I would tolerate the smells and not complain. I didn't
complain: It was on the fourth floor, near the stewardesses. It saved a lot of problems.