The weather is fairly fresh here today. Jorge and I went into town this morning to collect the leather item we were meant to get last week. What should have been a 1 hour bus ride into town (before taking the metro to our destination) turned out way more.
Every year, around this time, they have a day where ALL university student hopefuls go to allocated schools and universities to do a test to see if they qualify. One of those locations was on our route. The traffic was backed up for miles! Many of the students on the bus got off way before their destination to walk, as it would be faster. They had to check in by 1pm or lose out on their chance to go to university until the following year. Once through that traffic mess, we 'sped' along to the metro station for the next leg of the journey. We took a different route to last week to eliminate a lot of the walking.
The leather guy came through for us this time. I'm fairly pleased with the work. We decided to go home the same way we went there last week to avoid the university issues, which turned out to be a mistake.... after a fashion. We walked from Republica to Liberdade (the Japanese quarter), where we stopped off at one of their little supermarkets. This place is incredible to walk through... narrow and cramped with absolutely everything written in Japanese... with tiny translations to either Portuguese or English below the Japanese. We got some of our favourite Japanese biscuits and I suggested we go through to the spice section. I struggle to get decent spices here. We went this whole winter with No curry! Much to my delight, curry is just what I found there! A whole big bag of it! : ) And mushrooms, for which I would gladly exchange a limb. We love mushrooms here, but struggle to find them and when we do, they're horrendously expensive. They're reasonably easy to find in pickled form, but who wants pickled mushrooms. I want them fresh!
We went off to get the bus. Liberdade is one huge construction site right now, so we pretty much end up having to stand in the road waiting for the bus. We waited for around 45 minutes (we should have taken the hint). Finally the bus came and people crawled out from the woodwork to pile on. Who knows where the others were waiting.
I think, for the home trip, we should have done the route we went out on. The favela I blogged about was being filmed. Funny, the last time we went through, I was saying to Jorge that I wished we could get that place on film and wondered if anyone would be brave enough to try. A massive detour and an idiot who felt the need to stand behind my seat and lean over my head (I seem to attract them) later, we got home just before Tat left to go to her dance meeting. Now I need to finish up those photos I took. Yes, I'm still muddling my way through them.
Hope you're all having a good weekend.
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Tint~