He has Crabs!!!!

So I wanted to follow-up on Sarah's post about roadside salesman.  You can really buy anything on the streets.  I will take some more pictures later and show you, but if you want a steering wheel cover, or cell phone charger there is likely someone who is standing at the stop light ready to sell it to you.  We will cover those later.

But this is one of my favorite salesman.  Those are crabs hanging from those Teepees.  Yeah real live crabs and they are all for sale. 

That daper looking guy sitting against the wall caught them the night before and is now selling them on the side of the road.

So what do you get?  You get 10 live crabs for R$10 or $5USD.  

For those of you concerned about eating truly organic food, with no hormones and at an affordable price, this just might be your guy!

 Crab Salesman on the Avenida!

They are still alive, a bunch of 10 is R$10 or $5USD.

They are all alive and pinching!

Roadside Salesmen

Here some of the best stuff around is for sale on the side of the road. Lots of great fruit, most of it is really cheap. Music. Coconuts. Crabs. There's even a guy that makes 'grills' out of tire rims and sells them on the side of the road. We normally buy pineapples from the first picture. The second one we've never stopped at, but it's on our way home. The third one is a good example of the cart vendors that run around. There are guys that pretty much cart around a large speaker and blast music. I guess they're selling cds. But I'm not sure because I've never actually talked to one. Oh, and the guy who has 'God is Loyal' on his CD truck is probably selling some very un-Godly cds. But I guess God forgives, and that's what's good right?

Fruit while you wait at the light!

More fruit and veggies!

Mobile CD Store!

Baby for Sale!

Well Sarah is gone to the states for the next 40 days for work.  Make sure you check out her website g here! and her blog here!

So this is my first blog post!  Can you believe that we have been here almost 10 months and I have yet to do a blog post.  Well while Sarah is gone I am going to keep the blog going.

We are currently working on our about us page so be on the look out for that too.

So we have been here for 10 months and we are loving it.  We really do enjoy things here.  Sure there are some things that still baffle and bother us...like the banks being on strike or the huge hassel of getting Sarah's visa fixed and taken care of.  But we are getting used to it all.

And then of course there are the things that we still find humorous. Recently we have been noticing funny packaging.  Look at these two packages and tell me what you think!

 Check out what I would call a cornish hen on the right...it's a baby!  They sell babies in the supermarkets!  Now we know they don't really sell babies, but the use of the word is pretty funny if you ask me.

This is a different supermarket, but still funny.  Breakfast of Champions! SUPER BALLS!  Now I know I am reverting to my teenage self by thinking this is funny, but come on it's funny you have to admit it!

There are so many other things just like this, but these are the latest two that I happened to snap photos of.  Language is so funny sometimes you just have to laugh at it, what works in one place doesn't always work in another.

Post your funny packaging pics and stories in our comments section.

Just pictures and captions.

I just realized I haven't posted in a while. Our stuff arrived and I've been working on that non-stop! Here's a catcher-upper.

Toby's cousin Renata, one of our closest friends here, took me to Recife's city center shopping area a while ago. It's really crazy, tons of vendors, stores just JAM packed with every sort of good you could imagine. The food section looked like a lot more fun to me, but we spent a lot of time in the notebook/hair accessory and jewelry part of town. I'll put up more pictures when I go back and visit the fruit section. Renata is inside the store here in the yellow dress. Also, note the store is called "a lot more". I have no idea how you could top that.

I have never seen so many leaks as I have here. This one that finally got some work done had been leaking (releasing a sizable stream of water into the road non-stop) since we moved in. I've noticed about 4 more, just on my walk to Jiu Jitsu. No idea whether it's a busted pipe or some sort of magical moving spring that's moving around the city. I guess fixing them is one way to keep cool on the job?

I've walked by this tree every other day for a while now, it's on the way to Jiu Jitsu. Toby's called it everything from a mango tree (which are huge magnolia-like trees, they look nothing like this) to a coconut palm (which, again, look mildly similar but not very. I do love his inability to spot a plant, it's cute). I've seen it in different stages of fruiting, and kept thinking it looked like a papaya, but thought there was no way that tree could support all those full size papayas (called mamao here).

Well, it is in fact a papaya tree. I did a little more research. They are apparently easy to grow from seed (from storebought fruit, no less), so I'm planting some as soon as my 'compost' looks brown enough to call dirt. The papayas in the photo are young. The trees fruit year round and grow to fruiting stage in less than a year. They fruit year round and grow well here. Here we come papaya tree.

Shopping Brazil

Malls are called 'shopping'. Like our mall is called Shopping Guararapes (Jaboatao dos Guararapes is our city's name). Recife's mall is Shopping Recife. But it's really just a mall. I don't think people say "Hey, you want to go to the mall?" They say "Hey, you want to go to Shopping Guararapes?".

Now, on the other hand, I'm still having a hard time understanding people, so that could easily be way wrong. In fact, it probably is. But I like to think that's what they're saying. Other funny things while shopping are:

Yes, it was the most expensive paper towel brand. What a...uhh...what's the word?

The picture takes away all the fun. There's no reference to the size of these. They were like 5 gallon buckets of margarine.

Green or orange toilet paper? Why? Or, more appropriately, why not!

Just a Starter

Hey all! Most of you who have this address are friends and family, so posts will be mostly personal to start, but hopefully this blog will morph into something that could help persons thinking about moving to Brazil. Here are a few pictures from our (my first, Toby's like, hundredth) Thanksgiving trip to Recife, Olinda and Tamandare.