Rio in the rain

Off to the city today to do a couple of recordings (people I haven’t worked with before, good to have new clients and it all went well) and take the camera in for repair (the lens is making a weird noise). It was tipping it down, some of the roads were under water and the umbrella salesmen were doing a great trade.  I paused to get this shot of people sheltering in Rio’s most traditional and iconic coffee shop, recently visited by digitaldaze and Barrioboy. Never having entered it, I considered popping in, just to say I’d been there. But that would have entailed jumping a lot of puddles, so I gave it a miss, yet again. One day….
 
On to cross off some other errands - failed to unblock the mobile phone kindly passed on my daughter, and a search for a special product to stop the ants from destroying our creepers was equally unsuccessful, but I did find someone to engrave the winner’s name on the venerable Quaich, played for since 1928.
 
A steak sandwich at 4 p.m., having missed lunch, then back home, as we were due for visit by a friend of many mutual friends. She duly came and we soon felt as if we had known each other for years. She’s basically in Brazil on a work trip for her family non-profit organisation, BRAYCE (Brazilian American Youth Cultural Exchange. It wasn’t until half-way through dinner that we learned that she was widowed less than a year ago, so it’s a big step for her to come down here and take on the role that was largely her husband’s, making contact with their students and also immersing herself in Portuguese. She’s lonely and in mourning, but brave and determined to make a go of it. We were very touched by her courage.