Spurious

I went for a juice in the shade with a friend at the Mercado do Frango (literally, Chicken Market) along the Marginal. This is where all the ladies who formerly grilled chicken on hot coals along the beach and served it up to punters plonked on the sand have been collectivised, in the name of aesthetics and so the authorities can charge fees for the use of stalls. My friend is Rwandan and was born in July 1994, literally the month that the genocide ended. Most of his extended family were lost. Imagine the inherited trauma. He displays acres of resilience, like most Africans.

Back at the hotel I did some restorative yoga. I didn’t have the required yoga strap, block and blanket so improvised with some bedding, my belt and my stubborn copy of War and Peace, which so far I estimate to have inched through one-sixteenth of at most.

I am finding my attitude towards work boundaries and stress shifting very healthily of late. Whether this is because of an easier workload at the moment or active steps I am taking, time will tell. But it’s nice that work is not dominating my life.

On the Marginal it’s very typical to see lads dangling fresh fish to catch the eye of motorists, and the ubiquitous traffic police never far away, ready to inconvenience the public for spurious reasons.