Some local photos

None taken by me, but quite telling.  This is this week, and last week, in Bahia.

United Nations getting wet

Not that you can tell much from this picture through a rainy window, on a rainy day, where traffic and flooding is sucking so bad that the city is nearly shut down, but there is a UN conference going on here right now.  According to this site, it is the United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.  If my suspicions are right, all these poor people are meeting in tents and inside the building with the loudes tin roof ever in the rain, and are getting water logged walking between their probable hotel (Holiday Inn, the only one in Salvador, across the street) and the convention center.  Last week a huge display of holey lycra was strung up in front, covering the bottom half of this very large building and I wondered why.  Now I think it might be an attempt to decorate for the conference in the traditional manner we do here (minus the tons of balloons), but the quantity of fabric and the hieght of the building were so great that no one bothered to really do the job.  The result is a very peculiar spectacle, visible all the way down to the ocean front.

April showers 2010

About a year ago, I put up a post about the horrible rain and flooding and what not.  Apparently this will now be a yearly or perhaps monthly post.  The rain is back.  It's already caused hundreds of deaths down south.  And it's come to call in Bahia again (although from what I was told yesterday, the news casters are now saying these last three days of rain is just the cold front coming in and are not even dumping what was predicted, YET).  There are parts of the city that have been without power since the rain started on Wednesday and are still, as far as I can tell.  It's kind of the talk of the town.  (fellow Bahia blogger)

So far it's not nearly as bad as it was last year, where the end of my road disappeared, the wall at the French school down the street collapsed, and the sewer over flowed all over the street.  At least, not yet.

There is also the new characteristic of frequent lightning and thunder, not usually a staple of storms here in Bahia.  You have to admit, the clouds coming in over the ocean are pretty scary looking.

Not a scarecrow

At the risk of republishing a photo (as you can see it is from 2006) that you have already seen, meet Judas.  Part of the Easter tradition here is to blow up the biblical betrayer of Jesus.  You can see these cute little guys for sale at the side of the road, full of fireworks (have you noticed that our holidays almost always include some fireworks?).  You  have a big Easter party with your extended family, read a poem about what Judas leaves each person (he only leaves unpleasant things and is definitely written to evoke a laugh or two), and then light that sucker on fire.  It's kind of gruesome on many levels, not the least of which is the risk he will explode on someone and blow off a few fingers.  As I'm pretty sure I wrote a post about this somewhere several years ago and I have several other things on my list today, I won't go into too much detail.  This isn't your fuzzy bunny Easter down here - we don't look for baskets with chocolate bunnies, wear pretty spring dresses, or have quiet family dinners; we give our kids a large chocolate egg (no searching involved), let them eat it and a bunch of other crap, run around like while animals, and then blow up a biblical figure made of fireworks.  At least it's a good time.