The Americans think Brazilian coffee is weird. They think the Brazilian crowds are too enthusiastic. They are appalled by Brazil's skimpy beachwear - for guys and girls.

It looks like Brazil is a little too much for the Americans. And the Brazilian press is reporting on all these issues, as if America was the authority on life, and Brazil was some alien nation.

But this confrontation, one which is played out away from the pools and the courts, is one of the most interesting to have come out of the Olympic Games so far.

The United States doesn't know much about Brazil's history or its culture: Brazil is a relatively distant and mysterious land. Brazil boasts a foreign and unfamiliar language, and an incomprehensible social fabric - one which is ridden with contradictions that not even the Brazilians themselves understand.

Brazil is also the nation with the most potential to rival the USA in the whole of the Western hemisphere. The country's landmass is bigger than that of the USA; its population, huge; its resources, abundant.

Brazil has the second largest economy in the Americas; an economy with massive and mostly untapped potential to grow. Cultured Americans are aware of the fact that, in the long term, Brazil could pose a threat to the USA's current prevalence in the global arena.

Less cultured people might not know this, but they can intuit it. And to fend off this unsettling feeling, they dwell on clichés: Brazil is a tropical rainforest infested with snakes and monkeys, Zika virus has contaminated the whole population, gang shootouts occur on every street corner at every hour of the day.

It hasn't helped matters that the Olympics have coincided with one of the worst moments in Brazilian history. The economy is down in the dumps and the political world is wracked with chaos. What's more some of the most promising parts of the so-called Rio 2016 Legacy are still nothing more than just a pipedream.

And yet, in spite of all of this, everything is going fairly well. Apart from one or two greenish pools. The Brazilian crowd's enthusiasm in the Olympic stands makes up for a few complaining athletes. Sure, the Brazilians are last-minute, off-the-cuff kind of people, but many tourists have been pleasantly surprised at how friendly and helpful they are.

In this way, Brazilians have been slowly working their charm on the Americans. Coverage of the NBC network has been showing not just Rio's botches, but now, also, Rio's boons.

So what: Brazilian coffee is not up to American standards? This is a reason to be at loggerheads.

Translated by GILLIAN SOPHIE HARRIS

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