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.
Kristy Dempsey 
More! More! More! You won’t be able to post later this week, right, so keep posting now!
Fascinating! A joggers’ lane instead of a bike lane.
I love seeing these photographs, K. 🙂
An exercise lane–I am so impressed! And “Coopering,” what a great word.
These glimpses of Brazil are tantalizing.
The exercise lane is so cool. Love your pics!
Totally loving your photos!
Wow, I love seeing glimpses of Brazil.
I’m really enjoying your snippets of Brazilian life.
Interesting. I’d like to see it someday!
Thanks so much for posting these, Kristy. I’m loving seeing these snippets of life in Brazil.
Interesting tidbits! I love the cooper pic…fascinating!
I love your pics, Kristy!
Thanks for the slice of Brazilian life!
Coconut water
{{Shudder}}, not my favorite; nor was the rice water type drink sold by the street vendors while we lived in MAracaibo, Venezuela. But, I have to tell you, to be in South America again would be wonderful. Thanks for the pictures.
I love the differences in culture. This looks like our bike lanes, though it has the lovely bumps in the roads to prevent cars from running over the people, I presume…. We don’t have much in terms of a society built around exercise, like this one. But it sure would be nice. I am pleased to see that each time we redo roads, we are now adding bike lanes and handicapped curbs to the sidewalks though.