Verandah on Life

Or so it certainly seemed, as I sat on the verandah of 'Corujinha de Copacabana' chopperia established 50 years ago, looking onto the Sunday open air market in which all life seemed to boil.

The policeman yelled at the refuse lorry driver, the kid begged with lowing moans at the table of a fish-eating elderly gent, the stall owner played blind with his hands over his face and staggered, to hoots of laughter, into one stick-strong stall after another, the banana seller shouted the varieties and prices of every yellow finger on his table, and the fishmonger scooped up his fillets and flopped them into barrels readying for the off.

And in it, through it, people munched, nibbled, gulped, and sooked, and the gent painstakingly removed the bones from his fish and the seeds from his tomato and, with a slight tremor in his wrist, placed the next succulent Sunday morsel in his mouth.

Time to move on now, as the stalls are dismantled and the furtive counting of notes begins.

Footnote:
Today was Gay Pride Day in Rio, familiar to anyone who is following Michael Palin's 'Brazil' series. I lost all my photos of it and over 10,000 more from my camara app storage; the best were tweaked and saved elsewhere but still lots of raw material gone.