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.

Rain showers don't bring mayflowers, they bring floods

The rainy season has arrived fast and furious. Despite the fact that heavy rains plague us at least 3 months out of the year here, engineers cannot be troubled to deal with adequate drainage when designing roads and city spaces. Sometimes it seems they cannot even be troubled by trying to address traffic flow. Today it began raining heavily around 10 AM. A normal 5 minute drive took more than 2 hours. Some parts of the city were completely under water. Where I work people were out digging canals around the building to try to get the water directed somewhere other than inside the building.



Streets like this one, which are so numerous around the city, become waterfalls of rushing water carrying with it all manner of crap from the surrounding areas above. It all pools at the bottom, some low laying area, sometimes inside a parking area, or worse someone or several people's homes, and more often than not, also a busy street. People try to escape the rising waters, driving the wrong way down one way streets, coming head to head with motorists trying to go the opposite direction trying to do the same thing and bringing everyone to a complete stand still.

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Our mayor, or someone, declared a state of emergency (again) and advised everyone to stay home so as to not float away in their cars. Here I am at home, despite not having a car.

The power of rain

It rains often here, sometimes everyday during certain seasons. It is a fact of existence here that if you place something outside, it will probably get rained on, even if it's in a "covered" area. Knowing this, certain precautions should be taken when building, one would think. Like using certain types of paint, sealant, cement, what have you. I am not an expert in construction, but generally speaking it seems some people who are building things here are not either ( actually many people who work in construction here were probably never formally trained to do anything, but learn on the job).

Take my balcony wall, for example. A solid cement low wall. Then pained white. Then painted again. And again. And probably a few more times. And then the rain falls on the edge of the wall. And more rain falls. And more. And soon there is a small hole in the paint surrounded by a bubble that when tapped either squirts out 1) water, if it has been raining, or 2) cement dust, if it has not. Then more bubbles develop. Then a large sagging mound begins to form at the bottom as all the paint separates from the wall over a two month period. Finally, a whole section of solid paint falls off, pouring piles of cement dust all over the balcony to blow into our bedroom. The rest quickly follows with the help of the resident small child.

Who is responsible to fix it? Well, techincally the condo, as it is an outside portion of the building. We spent about 6 months with cement dust wall until we arranged someone to do it ourselves.

I gather this sort of thing is not entirely uncommon, considering I have seen buildings go up here that 6 months later have whole sections of tiles missing from the side where they just peeled away from the wall and fell to the ground below.

Rain, it's a powerful thing. And it's raining now. Again. As it has been for days.

Rain Rain, go away....

Yeah, so this is an old picture. But the stretch of road looks about the same right now, so I don't feel too bad posting it. Between being gripada again and all this lovely weather we are having lately, I haven't felt too inspired to go out taking pictures of new things. Not that there haven't been some interesting things happening here lately - an accident involving a SKOL truck and some cases of beer falling off onto the cars behind it blocking the entire Orla in the Itapua bound direction comes to mind - I just haven't felt like dragging around my camera.

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.

The rainy season

And so begins winter time. Supposedly arctic air is pushing up from the south, making us windy and cooler here. It was almost so cold I didn't want to shower this morning. It is not infrequent to see people dressed in jackets, hats and scarves in weather like this - outfits much akin to a brisk fall day in MI, right along side people dressed like those in this photo. Today, I wore long sleeves, a long skirt, and I seriously considered if I should take a jacket or not. When I got home, I had hot cocoa. Tonight I will probably sleep with a blanket - it's only like 75! Brrrrrrrr.....

More rainy days

Rather than give big explanations for these rainy photos, I am just going to post a mess of them here in the hopes that they will explain themselves. It's raining.... a lot.



This is what happens with the little stands on the street when it rains - they get covered with random pieces of plastic, old umbrellas with beer slogans on them, and then are flocked to by men without shirts who wish to remain semi-dry.






Trash anyone? I hate to imagine what kind of uckyness is going into the ground water from this pile, or into that water running down the street in a big river over the concrete that you have to wade through to get to the sidewalk.





I just think this is funny. There is a whole wall of HAM in Brotas. It's the wall around the Hospital something or another, but all the HAM is comical to me. HAM HAM HAM HAM....

Favelas in the rain

It has been raining non-stop pretty much since Friday here. Although a common occurance in Michigan, in our lovely coastal city here it is not so common. Grey and rainy weather doesn't make for good picture taking (I know, I took about 20 shots today and only two came out and the quality is not really top notch either), it can make for good story telling about Bahia. In a city built like most "developing" country cities, there is a great hail-all to cement and not so much room left for open ground and vegetation. When there is more than a light sprinkel, water pools in various low laying places, runs like rivers down the street, and in favelas creates huge, resident-killing mud slides. Many favelas are built on hillsides, those areas being less desireable by people with monitary means because they are difficult to build on. One dwelling is built and sells the rights to build on their roof top, or perhaps half on the roof and half up the hillside, and POOF, here we are in a disaster waiting to happen. Last year I think I heard a number around 160 people killed by mud slides in favelas. I am sure it is actually higher than that and those are just the ones who make the news.