As you start to pity yourself for dying at the young age of 23, you see a bright light in the distance. You close your eyes but it's so bright that your eyelids can't stop it. It's getting closer and closer. With a thud you're suddenly laying in the middle of a street. You hear the screeching of tires as the light continues approaching. You realise a car is seconds away from running you over and think "If I wasn't already dead, now I'm definitely dead." The car swerves to avoid you and you hear the angry voice of the driver within, screaming obscenities at you as it takes off into the distance. "What language was that?" you wonder as you feel your consciousness sluggishly return to your brain. An intense wave of nausea wrapped in dread starts to creep up from your stomach. Before you know it, the scrambled eggs on toast you had for breakfast are lying on the street in front of you. You feel better. 

"Where the f@*$ am I?" you begin to wonder as you look around, searching for clues. A dubiously constructed cinder block building stands on the side of the road. It looks like a shop of sorts, but the sun-washed sign above it's door is unintelligible. You recognise the letters but the words they form simply don't make any sense. A man is dutifully sweeping the steps leading to the door of the shop, but he doesn't seem to notice you. On the other side of the road you see a dense wall of foliage, palm trees peeking out of the top at erratic intervals. It's night time, but the warm humidity of the air around you is comforting. Your eyes continue wondering, until they fall on a familiar red octagonal street sign. Instead of the "STOP" you're accustomed to seeing on this sign, it reads "PARE". You start walking towards the sign and see that a bigger road lies beyond it.

You suddenly notice the sound of a ticking clock somewhere in your auditory periphery. You look around you, but don't see any obvious sources of the sound. The ticking grows louder and more obnoxious; it seems as though the sound is appearing out of thin air, mocking you. As you continue to look around, now growing somewhat anxious, you hesitantly mutter the word "Italy" under your breath, with little confidence. "INCORRECT!", a robotic voice thunders from the heavens. "S*&$", you think, "humid, warm, luscious…?" With even less confidence than the first time, you mutter "Mexico…?" "INCORRECT!", the voice returns.

The ticking clock speeds up and grows louder as your mind starts racing, searching for any clue as to where you are. Some distance down the larger road you see a sign, but it's too far away to read. Desperate, you start sprinting towards it, until you can start to make out the words. The top line reads "Curitiba - 274 km", below that, "São Paulo - 677 km". You stare intensely at the sign. "São Paulo?", you think, "That's in Brazil, I'm in Brazil!". You suddenly see that a new pair of headlights is approaching. They're getting uncomfortably close.  "BRAZIL! SÃO PAULO!" you yell at the top of your lungs as you brace for impact. Everything goes black. The deafening honk of the car fades off into the distance and once again you feel a numbness in your toes. 

The robotic voice returns, this time in a gentler tone. "Correct!" it says, before continuing with, "943 Points. Your guess was 677 km from the correct location. Would you like to continue to the next round?" 

Satisfied with your score, and the fact that you're still alive, you contemplate doing another round. You quickly decide against it though, and mutter a soft, "no thank you." As you do so, you find yourself back at your desk. It's still raining outside. A steaming cup of coffee is now sitting next to you on the desk, as if you were never gone. You turn your attention to your laptop, where you notice an open webpage on your browser. It's a URL you don't recognise, but it feels oddly familiar; www.geoguessr.com.

"Hmm," you think to yourself, "maybe I should do another round."