Rio so far – Marike

First, I’m going to write about the food we’ve had so far that was different.
Sunday we went shopping, as we couldn’t do any of the customs and that before Monday. We went to a HUGE shopping mall – the whole place crammed with clothes shops, jewellery shops and fast food places. No super market. At all. So we went walking around but couldn’t find a proper food shop ANYWHERE! We didn’t buy any food on Sunday except for lunch. It was interesting to try and understand what it was that the samoosa lookalikes contained, but they all turned out yummy. =)
On my mom’s birthday we went on a shopping expedition to see if we could buy any beach dresses. Nu such luck – we found a lot of food shops. An interesting thing about Rio: it seems there are no really good bakery’s. We found one that at least sold fresh bread (nowhere else had we come upon such a novelty) and we bought some interesting sweet and salty stuff to munch on. It was that same day that we bought a melon. Except this one was yellow and oblong with grooves in. Smooth skin. It tasted exactly the same as any other melon (very nice and sweet) but it looked weird.
We also bought a coconut. We thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to get open, as they sold it with straws, but it proved to be a much bigger challenge than anticipated. In the end, the nut was cracked with a hammer and a chisel, courtesy of my dad. The ‘water’ of the coconut tastes like funny tasting water. Okay, but I like the coconut flesh much better. =D We all helped to eat that. Karin didn’t much like the juice.
Another extremely strange thing is the eggs – they are white! Like those chocolate Easter eggs made by Beacon. They’re just bigger than the chocolate eggs ^_^

Okay, now I shall make some observations concerning the dress code of the people here. Pretty much ‘anything goes’. I have seen middle aged men in the mall not wearing a shirt, or on the streets in a speedo (okay, this was over the weekend.) Dresses are much more in evidence than in South Africa. Over the last week I have worn almost every ‘dress’ type of clothing I have. It just seems to fit in much better. For women . . . tight and short. They wear their hair long. Something I find extremely weird, is that the people look almost no different from South Africans – but don’t speak a word of English!! I find it difficult to believe that the very sophisticated lady standing in the TIM shop (our equivalent would probably be MTN or Vodacom) can’t speak a word of English.

When we first arrived, it seemed that there would be a shower of rain every night – sadly, this was not to last, and since this practice of the weather has seemingly ceased to be, we suffer from heat. This invasion has led to drastic measures, such as breaking out the wind-catcher and putting up the blue ‘block-the-sun-from-shining-directly-onto-the-deck’ sail. The wind catcher is a contraption made from four long square sails attached to each other on one side, so that if you look at them from the top, they form a cross – +. Two sticks are fastened to keep the top in the form of a cross, and a loop is also attached to the top, so you can hoist the wind catcher up. (It’s about as long as I am.) The bottom also has two sticks which are wedged in an open hatch. I should really draw a picture. Anyway – this allows wind blowing from any direction to be caught and blown below.

And I think this concludes the blog update =D
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