Daylight robbery

…although I prefer to think of it as relocation to avoid annihilation. Took time of work to truck up the hill with our caretaker and his hulking grandson to extract a pink banana sapling or two to bring down to Rio, before someone goes and concretes them over. They have grown so much since last week that I wasn’t sure we’d be able to extract them, but brute force won the day. Yesterday, I manage to dig up an African tulip seedling from a bulldozed condominium site. The mimosa I rescued in an earlier attempt unfortunately didn’t survive.

Back down in Rio, our resident handyman told us that streets not far away were blocked and police were preventing residents from returning to their homes in a favela (shantytown) between Ipanema and Copacabana because of gunfights with drug gangs. Just what’s needed to burnish Brazil’s image before the World Cup…