Smart FUZZY!

I have no anicdotes to go with this photo, only to say I took it on Paralela (our sort of highway in the city) on Sunday and thought it was quite funny. And the fox is cute too, even sideways...

Beware of snake!

Just on the outskirts of the city, one can easily find poisonous snakes - usually coral snakes to be exact. They are usually the main reasoning behind the trimming of grass and maintaining of landscaping, lest you be walking through your "natural" yard one morning and step on one, resulting in death. It's also a good reason not to just go walking into someone's private property if it's not regularly maintained. This sign is one of several strung up around some beach front property that appears to owned but not lived on - "soon to be developed." Between this and the barbed wire everywhere, I can only assume they mean to keep out squatters or others who might think "hey, let's go check this place out because no one lives there." The question remains as to if the owners mean to warn against wild snakes that might be in the property or a snake they put there themselves to protect the property, because the wording here "careful snake" (or more colloquially "beware of snake") is similar to the "cuidado cãe" (more less the USA equivalent to "beware of dog").

Razor tip sharp

A sweet even scale of notes coming from a simple pan pipe signals the arrival of the knife sharpener (the "call"). This guy wheels his sharpener around the neighborhoods, sharpening your scissors, your knives, your machetes, anything metal that needs it. For about R$3 an object, you can make all your cutting and slicing and hacking apparatuses like new. This is a lot less than buying new scissors and knives and machetes. The sharpener is a foot pedal contraption that must work somewhat like old sewing machines and that any freshman engineering major could probably build, yet I could not explain it to you (you know us language people...). For a video of my knives and scissors being sharpened click here.

Um, dois, tres!

Like we have seen before, you can buy just about anything you have a hankering for on the street. This is Tonho and he is a "historia" as my husband would call him, meaning he's been around a long time. You want to know anything about Salvador, he could probably tell you; he has been walking the streets selling pipoca about 18 years or so. He remembers our neighborhood before it was populated, he remembers the old indian who had a bar around the corner (who cursed the land when he was kicked off and no shop has survived there since), he remembers when there when the Centro was actually the centro and not on Tancredo Neves... He walks the streets with a large bike horn attatched to his cart (bike horns are the "call" of popcorn - every vendor has a song; see Capelinha for another example), honking away, keeping an eye out for crazy drivers with his sideview mirror. He sells three types of things - popcorn with molasses (just like carmel corn!), plain popcorn, and candy in his divided mobile store. Should you want to buy something, you need only yell "Pipoca!" when you hear the bike horn.

Good Omen

This is by far the coolest thing I have ever taken a photo of, in my opinion. I wish I could have taken a photo of the actual event, but evidence is good enough.

These two paths here are the tracks of a sea turtle that came ashore and layed eggs sometime after 2 AM on New Years day, right in front of the house we were staying at in Busca Vida (and passed right over where I had fallen asleep with Ju earlier in the evening - good thing I moved, lest she had been scared off). The one on the right is the path in and the one on the left is the path out. Where the two converge is the laying site.

A TAMAR (the sea turtle project in Praia do Forte) guy came riding by on his bike, saw the paths, told my husband the story (I was still sleeping), checked the eggs and marked the site with this pole.

I remember reading somewhere that when the ships of the Conquistadors appeared on the horizen, the Aztecs could not see them because they had never before seen a ship, so the object didn't appear to them (not sure how we can validate this claim) - the lesson is that things when one has not experienced a thing before, one has a hard time seeing it for what it is. Case in point would be when I noticed all the poles up and down the beach here. They are everwhere in this area (the TAMAR guy says this is because no one here bothers them, unlike in Guarajuba or Praia do Forte, so this is an ideal place for sea turtle eggs), and despite having wandered this beach before, I had been completely blind.