I’m in an airport in the States at the moment but if I’d been in Brazil yesterday, here is where I would have been:

Every Friday afternoon in our city there is a flower fair, cut flowers and potted plants, trees and pottery. I don’t go every week, but I always love it when I go.

It’s a one pic day because we’re headed out the door to the airport for a trip to the States. Today’s pic is of Praca do Papa (Pope Park), a park and monument that was erected when the Pope spoke to the masses of Belo Horizonte in 1980. It’s at the top of a huge hill (one that I do repeats on when I’m training for a marathon) and there is now a playground. It’s a great place to take pictures and eat popcorn. My kids love to go there.

See you when I get to the States!

Two very typical Brazilian images today. This first one is the Pista de Cooper near our house. A pista de Cooper is an exercise lane, usually along a busy city street. Brazilians are a fairly active population, and this pista de Cooper near our house sometimes gets so crowded that it’s difficult to jog because you continually have to cut back and forth between people. There are juice bars along the route too, so often Brazilians stop for a juice or coconut water and sit and chat a while before resuming their daily walk. (And “Cooper” is what Brazilians call exercise, specifically walking or jogging, after Kenneth Cooper, the American credited for bringing the benefits of aerobic exercise to the masses.)

This next picture is not completely typical of Brazil but the reason for the little signs is typical. Every single day a truck, or more than one truck, comes by to see if we’d like to buy gas (we have gas stoves and some people have gas water heaters, so we use the bottles, or what do you call it, tanks (?)of gas that need to be replaced every so often.) Rather than go through the daily process of answering the interfone a million times a day, one building has come up with the ingenious idea of each apartment being responsible to use one of these tags to let the gas trucks know if they’d like to buy. So each of those “nao” (no) tags has a reverse that shows an apartment number so that the truck guys know which apartment would like gas and they don’t have to ring up to each one to ask. We answer the interfone at least twice a day, sometimes five times a day, just to say we don’t want gas all because we don’t have one of these handy little signs.

Oops, sorry, I missed yesterday! I’ll make it up to you though with two pics today.

Moving in a bit closer…

My street sign:

My mailbox:

The door to my apartment building: