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.

Sorry for my long absence once again guys... (B&B, thanks for asking where I was ;) Couldn't find time to edit and post pictures from my recent trip to Brazil, and I'm still figuring out a way to change my template and post pictures in a different way. Here I am, with my Fuji S5500, looking down at the Rio de Janeiro bay and the Santos Dumont airport (J. took this picture). No other place in the world seemed so much like home to me, in a quite strange way, as this is only my second visit and I hardly saw anything of the country... Well, I'll be passing by later with more pictures and check what you've been doing in your blogs :))

I'm still editing my Brazil pictures, but couldn't resist sharing this one with you guys. It was taken at the Corcovado hill (where that huge Jesus Christ statue is located), in Rio de Janeiro. The view from there was breathtaking...

Back to São Paulo again...

Modern windmills in the countryside... I had gone to a friends wedding near Torres Vedras when I saw these, relatively rare in Portugal.

Driving around in a warm summer night is always a delightful experience - specially when most of the crowds have migrated somewhere else for hollidays, leaving the streets empty. I wonder if the new digital cameras, with higher sensitivity or electronic stabilization systems work any better at night. I took these pictures days ago in Lisbon and Almada, where I grew up. The view in Almada, from behind my old home, hasn't changed much. There's the old factory, with it's chimney, a few eucalyptus in the horizon and the village of Cova da Piedade, the river and the lights. I also noticed that I've been (photo)blogging for a year now (not as often as I wanted or with the quality I intended). To all of you guys who've been visiting and posting comments, my sincere thank you!

My endless fascination with the Tagus... I rarely use the ferries that cross the river every ten minutes, so I took the opportunity to take some pics today. These past few days have had wonderful weather - not too fresh, not too hot, just like it should always be...