Day 7: Recife!!

      So today I wanted to show you around Recife and the beautiful things that I have been seeing so there are going to be a lot of really beautiful scenic pictures, I hope you love them like I do, it is breathtaking here!
      Recife means reef and the city is named after the reefs that are all along the coastline as you can see in this picture.  There are a lot of sharks and shark attacks in this area if you go past the reefs, but when the tide is low and the reefs are showing they act as a natural barrier.
   The entire area by where I lives runs along the beach.  I am a few streets away and can´t see it out my window but it is super close and doesn´t take long to walk there. 
    We spent time at the beach yesterday and the highlight of the day was seeing a man in a speedo...k that sounds weird and tons of men wear them here, but this one was special.  One might ask, what makes a speedo special, or, how could anyone have a speedo be the highlight of their day?  Well let me just tell you that it was a floral print speedo and it was pretty legit, my friend Berkley and I were very impressed, it was funny, I will try to get a picture of him on one of my blogs, because yes, I took a picture, bahahaha, I knew you would all want to be amazed by the floral speedo!  But not today, I am going to keep you in suspense for now.

     

 These pictures are awesome are they not?  On the right we have one of the gorgeous views out over the city of Olinda, there are about 50 billion churches in Olinda and they were built in like, the 1500´s so they are old!  The other one is a little more into the city of Recife and what it looks like whey you are not right along the coastline.  In this picture the roads actually have lines and lanes and stuff on them, there some roads here I have seen that don´t, because people just dive wherever they want to anyway, it is really funny.  Like it was in Mexico, they could take a three lane road and turn it into four or five lanes when they wanted to, it is just like that here and it cracks me up!

 Here is another view of the beautiful coast and the really cool reefs, it is fun when the tide is out because you can go and walk on them and play around.

    So I am sure that you have heard about favelas, or what are known as the ´slums´of Brazil.  From what I have seen they do not have any around here that look like the ones in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but this might be as close as it gets.  They are just a bunch of homes really close together, poorly constructed and run down where people who can´t afford an actual house or appartment go to live.

 These are two more pictures of just the outside of the museum that we went to the other day, this gate may look like the entrance, but it isn´t, it is just there to look pretty.  It doesn´t open that I know of, and the entrance is to the left of it.  The driveway is super long though to get to this place, we actually took this cart thing attached to a fourwheeler and had the guy drive us up to it!   After you get through the gate is when you get to see the scene below.  The gazebo over the water looks super nice, but you are not allowed to walk on the grass at this place so you can´t get to it, and even if you break the rules (which we may or may not have done in a different grassy area here, cough, cough) the bridge is blocked off so you can´t get out to it anyway, again they are obviously big on the whole, look but don´t touch thing here!

This is one of the old churches down in Old Recife, the part where things first got started

This is one of the fancy, very ornate and beautiful churches in Olinda, we didn´t get to go all the way inside but we got to look and it is very beautiful.

And here we have a building that might look a little more familiar to you, around here it is known as the temple of the Mormons and is actually one of the few things that is on the map we got from the airport!  It doesn´t have the area where a bunch of us are staying, but it has the temple so that is all that matters!  We went and did a session on Friday and it was wonderful and so peaceful there.  I love the church, it is true no matter where you go.  It was a little difficult to do it in Portuguese though, especially when I couldn´t understand some of the words that I was supposed to be saying, but I made it through, no worries!

 These, ruins I guess you could call them are near where we will do part of our internship, it is over here that we met up with the children and played games with them.  Some of the buildings here were originally used to slaughter cattle and they have little ditches that would take the blood under the building, when they slaughtered a cow it was like a river of blood, they said, going out.

 This is another view of Recife, in the distance you can see the big buildings along the coastline where I am living, we travel a lot, and pretty far away from where we live, Recife is a huge city and it seems even bigger when you are getting around on the public transportation!  Some of the busses hurtle along, kind of like the Harry Potter bus, at a break neck speed, barely avoiding cars, pedestrians and other vehicles and not stopping until it is absolutely necessary and then they slam on the breaks and only remain stopped until the person is either off or on the bus, barely, and then they are off again!  That was a fun first day learning to ride the bus here.

These are two more of the kids that we might possibly be working with for the internship, we just all love this picture because it shows how beautiful the people are here and how, even in their difficult situations they can find something to smile about.
     And lastly I wanted to put in here a picture of one plate of food that they have here.  Where we have Italian food, Mexica, Chinese, Indian, Korean and every other type of food, here they mainly just have good old Brazilian food and boy is it delicious.  Like I was telling you before during June they celebrate the harvesting of the corn and they make every dish imagineable with corn.  I have no idea who keeps coming up with these recipes but I have eaten so much corn this last week it is not even funny!  Corn bread, corn cakes, corn on the cob, corn in this sweet milky stuff, corn this and corn that, I didn´t think it was possible to do it, but they sure know how to utilize their corn around here!
    Love you all, you are amazing!