This week in Bahia goes on vacation

I know it seems like I must be doing it all the time, due to my sporatic posts over the last few months, but now I am going on a actual vacation - out of the country. So, obviously I won't be able to post anything until I get back, unless it is of something other than Bahia, which would, really, defeate the purpose of this blog. So, just to hold you all over for a while, here are several photos to ponder until my return in July.

As you may or may not know, the months of May, June, and July are winter here. Winter means rain and sun in the same ten minute stretch with no way to be assured that you will remain dry if you leave the house without an umbrella, no matter what the sky looks like in the morning, or what the forecast (hahaha) says. Most of the time, there is so much rain that the streets flood a bit and slow down traffic. And no matter what time of year it is, drivers seem to feel rain merits more cautious driving (hahaha), so you will likely be later than you plan if you head out in the rain. This particular door has nothing to do with the story, other than that the shot was taken in the rain. I thought it was a particularly nice picture, somewhere in Brotas.



This photo is particularly nice because of the nice "late" day sun shining on select spots on the building (late day being about 4pm, sun setting around 5:30ish), as well as showing the ingenius "jeito"for older building adaptations to electrical connections. Coming from somewhere out of the shot is a direct connection to the wires running electricity into this particular building - one connection obviously is somewhat planned, because you can see the glass fuses on the side of the building. The other, however, comes from I'm not sure where and goes directly into the corner of a window to supply power to a store that probably didn't have any connections before. Rather than breaking through walls and doing costly renovations, the easiest way to get your power is to go around the outside. Not astetically pleasing, but very common, even in newer buildings (our downstairs bathroom uses this route for an over head light, and it was built in the late 80's!).



You can buy almost anything you want on the street. The most common is pirated CDs and DVDs. Just yesterday I saw that Shrek 3 is already out for sale on the street, along with Ocean's 13. There seems to be no way to prevent it, at least in this country, and guys selling these illegal copies are almost as common as window washers. This one is stationed next to a bus stop, as vendors often are (there and at traffic lights). I have no idea why no one ever gets arrested for doing this, but I have never heard of it. I suppose it's better to be selling something, however illegal, instead of stealing.


And last but not least....

This great green tunnel is the entrance to the Salvador Airport, where I will be headed tomorow afternoon for an 18+ hour journey north. It's kind of a landmark and very memorable. This great green forest is made entirely of bamboo (it grows wild here, all over, who knew?) and goes about 3/4 of a mile (I think). It's quite attractive and makes you have the urge to pop out and take a few pictures, except that you might get run down by the other passing motorists who drive like bats out of hell through it. I have a friend who actually did wander around being photographed here, naked, as she told me, and was almost arrested.

Urban Cowboy

It's not terribley unusual here to see horses, or any kind of farm animal/livestock, within city limits on a regular basis. People keep them all over, and they are left grazing the grasses at the side of major roads, sometimes tied up, sometimes not, and are frequent road hazzards for unsuspecting motorists if they happen to think the grass on the other side might be tastier than where they are. Less common, at least in city limits, is the cowboy riding along the street (other than cops). This guy wasn't really riding in the street, but on the sidewalk between the lanes in each direction. He even had a saddle, which you usually don't see, and seemed dressed for the part. The only thing missing here is the cellphone he was chatting on right before I managed to drag out my camera.

Tree trimmers

I have been sitting on this photo for about 2 weeks for some reason. Just too lazy to log in and upload it I guess, that and the constant Ju distraction is making it difficult to sit down and finish anything online in a consistant time frame.

These are the tree trimmers of Coelba (electric company). Not that you can usually see the electric lines from the street anyway, but the overgrown trees do seem to become too overgrown and then they show up and trim peices off here and there at odd hours, like 7 am on a Sunday. There were 5 guys in this truck. In this photo, two of them were somewhere else picking up branches off the ground and dragging them either to this truck or into piles on the street. I have no idea what conditions allowed for one branch to enter the truck while others were left behind. There did not seem to be any commonly observable rule.

The truck would slowly drive along the street, stop under a random tree and extend this rickety ladder and I would not have trusted to climb on. One guy climbs up, jiggling the ladder all the way up, and starts cutting branches - with a large (and probably very very sharp) machete. This makes the shakey contraption wiggle even more and I feared I was going to witness some underpaid worker fall to his death or permanent handicap. After the branch was sufficiently hacked off with the giant knife, it would either drop to the ground where perhaps another worker would retrieve, or it would be somehow hooked on the wires you see attatched to the ladder, and shimmied down into the back of the truck. A neat contraption, but I wouldn't want to climb it and I bet in the States you'd have to sign about 30 papers stating you wouldn't sue anyone if you took off your arm somewhere in this process.