Closed

This morning, I paid a long overdue visit to a neighbour, now bedridden, having seemingly broken most of the bones in her body. She is skin and bone and bruises, the skin so transparent that you can practically see the blood running in her veins, but still a striking looking woman. She's not entirely lucid, but did recognize me and talked non-stop. It wasn't always easy to follow, but she made quite a lot of sense. Afterwards, her daughter told me something about her life,  concluding that she had lived it to the full, and then some. I said she ought to write her biography - whereupon the daughter told me a bit about her own life, which has also been pretty colourful.

We escaped from the furnace that is Rio this afternoon - the car thermometer registered 47°  C as we went through the long tunnel under the Corcovado mountain and the Christ statue. I suppose the exhaust fumes plus the hot bodywork on all the cars must have contributed, because obviously, we were out of the sun. Once outside, it varied between 39°  and 45, dropping to a mere 35 by the time we reached the foot of the hills. Our house is at around 3000 ft,  and on arrival there at 6.30 pm, it was a delightful 27°  C.

We had stopped at the top of the hills to get supplies and maybe some more shots of two little girls I blipped a while back. Their parents run a junk shop in a ramshackle old building, but today it was closed, so I had to content myself with a shot through the unglazed door of the extensive miscellany of junk inside.