Sound-blocking headphones will do fine, thank you.

The music in the restaurant was horrible. Take the worst pimba (corny Portuguese popular music, for the foreigners reading this) and play it as loud as you can with a disco beat thumping in the subwoofers. That was what was being served to us as the side dish and I wished for silence.

Fast-forward a couple of hours. The last train would be arriving at the station soon and I needed to be on it. It was drizzling, not enough to feel the drops, but just to be on the safe side I took cover in a stall in the station. While there, a group of six or seven young men come in. It's the usual Saturday night crowd at Santos: around twenty years old, jeans, sweatshirts, a hoodie here and there. A swagger in their walk that says "We're young, we're together and we're having fun". They sit on the other side of the stall.

As I wait for the train, something is amiss. Nothing's changed. The place is as quiet as it was before the group entered. Where were the usual loud and excited conversations of youth? A look at them explains it all. The conversations were there, all right, and they were certainly full of energy. I just didn't hear them because no words were spoken. All seven of them were happily gesturing with their arms in sign language.

They were deaf. That put my wish for silence in perspective.