The makings of a fun afternoon

Welcome back!

This shot was just too good to pass up. Some friends of ours live in a rather rustic condominium towards Itapua. It's full of kids who play soccer in the street and pot holes and a couple of stray dogs. This past weekend when we went to visit, it also had a large Skol (a popular Brasilian beer that I personally think tastes like ass) cooler in the middle of the street next door to a really interesting chopper that vaguely reminded me of a dune buggy and may even be designed for use on the beach. Unfortunately it was not plugged in...

The state of the world

Of all the nice photos I could have taken on my travels that show how incredibley insane and annoying air travel is here - I was on vacation and I did not. But let me just tell you that I spent more time in airports than I would have liked and sat in a terminal for hours with no flights leaving or arriving and thousands of people just sitting around. I will get some photos moving here soon though, rest assured, just as soon as school starts and I am able to think strait.

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.

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.....

Mosquitos beware

Long time no post. I have no real excuse other than lack of inspiration, until this week.

Not the best picture, I know. If you look closely, you will see a white truck with a sort of "sprayer" on the back, blowing out a smokey substance that hangs in the air for some time after it passes. This is the public health department's "Contra Dengue" movement. Several times a year, they send people to your house to walk through, put insecticide of some kind in your drains, and check all the places in your house where you might have standing water where mosquitos could lay eggs. Apparently they also send a truck around to blow mosquito killing fumes into the trees in residential areas. What the truck is spraying, I have no idea. Years of working for MSU Entomology made me terribley paranoid of things being sprayed out of the back of trucks to kill insects. Yet there were people walking around on the street as this truck went by, and they seemed unfazed.

The smoke hangs in the air a bit and I imagine settles on the leaves and the ground, doing it's job. How much of it is in my lungs?

Borracharia

Need tires? Just look for the sign made of a tire, or a large stack of them at the side of the road. Looking for new tires? Probably won't find them here. At least, it doesn't seem like many non-fully automated with lifts and what not stores sell new ones. If it doesn't look like a typical USA style tire store, you will probably have to go for the new used tire, which is much cheaper and more common. These hole in the wall stores are much more common than the fully automated ones. They can patch your tires, replace them, buy your used ones, you name it. Looks like this one does bike tires as well. Shame the bus got in the way of the cool sign made of a tire. Oh well.

(singing) The itsy bitsy anty....

No, it's not dirt. What you are looking at are the tinyest ants I have ever seen. They are by far the most irritating insect that infests homes here in Brasil (beating mosquitos only because at least there is a repelant for those). They work just as fast as the super speed ants upstairs, but they are always around, and are on everything, even me. Ever feel that tickle that might be a loose hair touching your arm? Nope, it's an ant. And that itchy feeling on your neck? Also an ant. Tickel in your nose or ear? Probably an ant. I can't figure out how to get rid of them - the smaller they are, the more ellusive they are. I wouldn't mind them so much if the didn't also populate the trash cans as well as investigave my table and Ju's high chair tray (which is where they are in this picture). They have sort of artistically surrounded some spilled juice here, but that doesn't really add anything credible to their CV in my book.

Stairway to nowhere

This is a stairway on my street. It used to go up to another street that runs along the top of the hill, but has long ago been walled up and blocked. Actually, there is a doorway with a large metal grate over it, with bricks walling it up behind it, so it seems it was sort of open after the initiall walling. There is another such stair way farther into the neighborhood that is in such a state that I don't even dare walk on it - full of holes, caved-in sections, and plants and trees growing out of every crevice. This one doesn't appear to be in too bad of shape, but I have not tried to investigate it thorally. The city is full of these funny little used-to-be-a-street-or-passage-but-was-blocked-for-some-unknown-reason things. Does it add to the charm? You be the judge.

Yeah, and old picture, deal with it

Due to the new "shopping" opening up on the other side of Tancredo Neves, Iguatemí is expanding. It has already been stated that there will not be enough parking for this new mall, nor will the traffic flow be lessened or helped by the numerous road renovations and expansions and confusions near by. So to compensate for the future competition for consumers who have little or no money, a new and improved parking ramp is being built to lure them by want to easy car access. Never mind that Iguatemí is still trying to fight the city to allow them to charge R$5 per car per park....

Pop

This is my dish towel. In case you can't tell, that is supposed to be a chicken on the top, and underneath is a nice row of eggs waiting to be eaten in their little egg holder cups. I remember when I was a kid, I loved having a hard boiled egg to eat for breakfast in that little cup. I thought it was so cool. Now they seem to be obsolete; I'm sure no one gives them as wedding presents anymore, and I had not seen them in stores in a long time. I have no idea if they have ever existed in Brasil, but they at least exist here in memory in my kitchen. When I first moved here, I thought this towel was so strange, and was baffled by the "Engrish" on the bottom of it. So much in fact, that I believe I already wrote about it once in my other blog. Eggs are Pop? In Michigan, pop is a carbonated drink, which made it even more funny to me. There are many other great examples of English here, perhaps I will begin a series...

Rain brings out all manner of creatures

Today we have some rain photos. It has been raining pretty much everyday since last week. It looks like it's going to continue to rain all the way through Carnaval which officially started in Bahia on Wednesday night.

First, a photo I took earlier and forgot to post. The rain seems to put everything on the move here, so I was only somewhat surprised to see a frog resting quietly in the cats' water bowl first thing in the morning. Actually, judging from the amount of water on the floor around the bowl, I suspect Lela was trying to get it out of there for some time, but some how proved unsuccessful. It's hard to see from the photo, but he (she?) has a lovely bright yellow speckled with black spots under the back legs that my husband insists is the poisen he (she?) carries for protection. We poured the bowl out in the garden, and the frog hung out under a cactus for another 10 minutes before disappearing.




Carnaval has begun in Bahia, more specifically here in our condo. Last night someone threw a Carnaval themed birthday party that lasted at least until 2AM, which is when some woman went screaming/laughing by our front window and woke me up. We get to "participate" in all the parties because we are right next to the pool, so we can either sleep through it, or roast with all the windows closed (although this only muffels the sound). The confettie and streamers are all over this morning, sticking to walls and sidewalks in the rain. There is even quite a bit of it in the pool, along with these strings of balloons so common at parties here. Rain won't ruin anyone's parade at this time of year.

What is it?

I just don't know. This strange construction seems to be made entirely of cement and is being erected inside a nature preserve in Busca Vida. This picture just doesn't do it justice. It seems to be a boxcar in the style of Frank-Loyd-Wright-meets-Salvador-Dali-kind-of-esk. There do no seem to be any roads to it and we didn't see any movement indicating an inhabitant. I have no idea what it's doing there, since I thought no one was allowed to build on or walk around in these federal preserves....

It's 78% of what you breath

Pick your non-poison. Air, like in the States (at least in some places) is free, but Nitrogen will cost you up to R$2 extra. Supposedly it will make your tires last longer by not allowing them to heat up so much while driving all over this hot hot city in the summer - an important detail where potholes the size of the car itself are not so "news worthy" as they should be. Sounds like a good deal, right? But how much longer will your tires last? No one seems to know. Another important point - no mixing allowed: once you choose N2 as your preferred gas, you have to stick with it. If you happen to be low and go to a station that doesn't have nitrogen available, you'll have to completely drain your tires and refill them with air. The infrequency N2 pumps in the city is what prevents us from putting it to the test.

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.