Just to dispel some Brazil myths:
1) +95% of the population live on the coast very far away from the Amazon. Most of the population has not been there. Most of the coast has a very different jungle biome called Mata Atlantica and the countryside close to the coast is not that different from temperate forest of Europe. That is what most all Brazilians are used to. There is a significant population in the arid northeast though and the cold south as well (which is even more similar to europe).
2) Manaus is the biggest city in the Amazon and it is huge developed place (and has been for decades). You are not in the middle of the jungle if you land in the airport. The countryside around the city is jungle though.
3) Brazilian people do not necessarily like or are used to tacos and spicy food. Mexico is _really_ far away from Brazil.
That was only 3 myths. Hardly a brazilian
Not even a gorillion
I would not be offended by the blood donation thing. They generalize based on administrative regions (Amazonas in this case) and not whether you visited a big developed city or not.
I had a similar blood donation issue for visiting a particular island in the Philippines, and could not donate for 4 months.
It is funny there is no similar treatment about TBE (tick disease) which is predominantly an European disease and very dangerous and much more common than Malaria is in most (all?) South American countries...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis
There is a vaccine available for TBE. I got it. It is expensive, and my insurance won't cover "travel vaccines".
https://www.cdc.gov/tick-borne-encephalitis/prevention/tick-...
$1,200, wow that is pricey!
I'm sitting here chuckling because you felt the need to post this.
Your points are valid. And there probably are plenty of Americans who needed the correction. But still.
I think 2) in particular makes some bits of the story evident that, at least, weren’t so obvious to me. I’m not well informed about the geography of the Amazon. For example, if Manaus is reasonably built up, I guess the hotel situation was mostly Spirit cheaping out rather than a limit on the actual hotel capacity of the town.
Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth?
Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.
Honestly at this point it is usually the Europeans that need this (I have been asked if Chile has good tacos from a European). At least in my experience, most USians (in spanish Americans means everyone in the hemisphere) now know more about South America than the average European.
(Which is to be expected, proximity and all)
I have a german last name, do you know how often people outside Brazil act weird when they learn I am Brazilian?
My grandparents came to Brazil right after WW1 way before the Nazis came to power. High ranking Nazis fled to south america because there were a lot of germans living there already. Nearly all german people who moved to south america did it way before WW2.
I just run into this stuff a lot living in Europe.