I took my small Panasanic DMC-LS1 digicam to work this morning, and also took these pictures on the way. It's a very basic camera, but does provide an HDTV format - basically a cropped 4:3 picture - and the results seemed interesting.

It's a cold and rainy day here. In the office, my feet are frozen and I want to go home! I imagine if these old apartments in front of my window are warm enough in winter... Something tells me that they're not...

Southern Spain's countryside looks like a desert in the Summer, but as green as Ireland in the winter. While driving away from Merida I ended up in Trujillo, a beautiful medieval city 60-70 kms away. A wonderful place, very well preserved, and also hometown to one of Spain's most famous "conquistadores", Francisco Pizarro (a hero to Spaniards, and a murderer in Amerindian eyes) . The main plaza has a statue in his memory. I was there for a few hours before heading home to Lisbon, 350kms away, and took these pictures. Definitely a place to retun in the future.

I was back to Merida, Spain, some days ago, and ended up travelling a bit around the area, to see the old Roman ruins. These ones belong to one of many aqueducts and is around 2000 years old.

A 1950's building near Av. dos EUA, in Lisbon. This whole area was made to look like America (with it's modern, tall buildings).
In my mind it still does.

This should be my last set of pictures from Brazil for a while, and it ends where it began - São Paulo. There's plenty of interesting architecture all over the giant city, like the Martinelli (first picture) and Banespa buildings (the last one, that resembles New York's Empire State Building). This time, there was also the Cow Parade, that brought hundreds of statues of cows, painted by local artists, to the whole city. You could find them in the streets, shopping malls, gardens, in the middle of the road...

Pictures from downtown Rio de Janeiro... The memory of slavery is very present in today´s Brazil. It was the first time I saw Africans depicted in neoclassical statues, in a clear hommage to their role in the formation of Brazilian culture. Near Ipanema, I saw that group of Chinese para-athletes quite busy with their bikes.

In Rio, it didn't take me long to find out that my four stars hotel was quite close to a "favela" - those small shanty town like suburbs, surrounding the rich and affluent bay, with its skyscrapers and deluxe apartments. One night I even heard what seemed like shooting and a grenade exploding. Actually, some families from the "favela" were just celebrating something with fireworks... For a less traditionalist approach to the "favela" - running away! - how about checking the "Favela Tours"?

In our last night in Rio, we decided to visit the Pão de Açúcar hill, and see the views to the city at night. It was a rainy day, bust just a few hours before, a TV company had been recording an ad for those fitness machines. You can see the hill is surrounded by a cloud. We were stuck there for a half an hour and we couldn't see a thing of the surrounding bay. Curiously, right at the top of the hill, there is a huge garden, with dozens of cats living freely and being fed by the people who work there.

São Paulo by night... That day we went to the teather, to see a play with António Fagundes (who we grew up watching on TV in Lisbon; after so many years, it is a weird feeling to see our idols "live" in a theater, on the other side of the world...). I stayed in the same hotel as previously, the Marian Palace, and possibly the same floor, where I photographed the skyscrapers.

While in Rio, I've tried not to photograph people without their consent. What a mistake, obviously! :)) With few exceptions, I ended up photographing mainly street performers, who seemed to be glad about it and to whom I gave a few coins in the end. There was a cook in the Corcovado restaurant that just kept laughing, when we asked him something in our European Portuguese. Basically, he couldn't understand a word of what we said!. For decades, we've been exposed to the Brazilian media (soap series, talk shows, etc) in Portugal and we can now understand their accent quite well. Sadly, the opposite doesn't happen yet.

There were few sunny days in Rio de Janeiro a few weeks ago. It was still winter, relatively fresh, but quite obviously a tropical climate. It is definitely one of the most beautiful places in the world, even with the poverty of the shanty towns around the bay and the violence reported by the media. The Corcovado Christ statue didn't seem to me as impressive and massive as I thought it would be, but that wonderful view is indeed there. Very rarely have I met such happy and vibrant people as the Brazilians, though.