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.