This is home in Rio de Janeiro!! We come in and out of this gate several times a day. You can see the corner of the guard house that is attended 24 hours a day. They unlock the gate as we approach to either come in or go out.
When we go out, we are on Rua Tirol, a pretty major road in the sense that there is a lot of traffic. In front of our house, it is a one way street with 2 lanes. Fortunately, there is a light upstream on the road that creates breaks for us to cross the street when we go to the gym.
Translation of description: State in the west of Austria in the Alps region. It is between Germany and Italy, Innsbruck is the capital (of the state, I assume).
Many people from Germany came to Brazil to live!
Normally, we turn left out of the gate to walk about 5 minutes to Rua Jacarepaguá where we turn left again on our way to the office/church. One Saturday morning as part of our exercise walk, we decided to explore our street by turning right and going to the end. Come and share Rua Tirol with us!!
We will start directly across the street from our building. This is the closest hardware store. We have bought tools like screwdrivers and other small and useful items!
Continuing up the street, below is a child center entrance on the opposite side from our house. Looks like a fun place to go!
This is looking back towards out apartment building. You can tell because the cars are coming towards us on the one way street.
This whole stretch of Rus Tirol has large condominios as the apartment buildings are called. They all have locked gates, some that are attended 24/7 like ours. Others you use your own key to enter.
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| This is a small store very near the house. Unfortunately it is quite expensive so we go only for emergencies -- like bread |
Since the road is one way, we have to walk quite a bit farther to catch the traffic going towards the church.
You may have noticed that all the the previous photos show a very flat terrain. And it is!
But the main road stops and now it is time to climb up and up and up into the Rua Tirol community.
The street is narrow -- but not too narrow to park on one side and have 2 cars pass each other.
The motorcycles (motos) you see on the right of the picture are a common vehicle. It is a cheap way to get up and down the hill quickly. You have to be very watchful because they come down very fast!!
The other way to get up and down Rua Tirol (and not walk -- or hike), is to take the 12 seater van called Kombi. Down on the flat part below you pick up the van just down the street from our apartment building. On the right is our good friend, Jessica, she is getting on the Kombi to go to her home on the upper part of Rua Tirol.
There are about 6 or so vans that go up and down Rua Tirol all day long! It costs R$3 (about US $1).
Here is the end of the line -- a very wide part of the road at a flat place on the hill. When we first hiked here, the kombis were parked in any way they could (It was Saturday morning and the up and down runs hadn't started.) But since then they organized it with designated spaces for each van
The road still goes up and up from here, but it gets much narrower.
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On the right below: This is standard street electric wires! All the wiring is above ground and I don't know how they keep track of what line is what.
The electric wires like this are city wide -- even on the flat section as seen below!
Some street scenes with some art included, some of which is advertising.
A Rat Churrasco!!!Turn left to go to the bar or the barbershop!
The big blue barrels on top are water storage barrels. The street reminded us a lot of Cape Verde!
When Dennis was in Brazil as a young missionary, many of the cars were Volkswagen bugs. You hardly see them now --
and this one has certainly seen better days!!
You see a little animal life.
Here are some chickens and a rooster.
We do have a very loud, very big rooster in a house behind our building that we hear nearly every morning!
And the place we most often see the cats and chickens are by the garbage cans.
Sometimes there is a small road that takes off from Rua Tirol -- basically a court to allow more houses to be built.
Another way to get more houses on the land is to build the houses with an alley way between. As you descend the hill, you can go past 4-5 more small houses, built one after another.
This is still Rua Tirol, but now there is a Rua A and Rua B.
First, as we discovered that Saturday morning, there is a community here where people share their lives and identity! On the right is the local community office. Don't know exactly what they do, but it is for the residents of Rua Tirol.
We started pretty early in the morning, and as we walked down the hill, the community was beginning to wake up!!!
Here, the bread delivery man has just finished his morning route dropping off all his bread.
It was nice for him to go up hill with an empty load.
We passed by this house with a cared for flower garden. The owner was willing to have her picture taken!
As we were walking down, we noticed that several men were carrying bird cages. I am not sure what they were doing, but we began noticing that many houses had bird cages hanging in front of houses or stores.
And another reason to live here are the........
Incredible Views!
Sorry, it is almost impossible to take a picture without wires stringing through!
We are getting above most of the houses, so the view is uncluttered by wires.
Below you see the hill we often climb up with the Church on the top. As you can tell, it is a good climb!
We are well above the 'city center' now and the road is lined with plants and very beautiful!
As we got to the end, we met a man coming out his gate. We think he was checking to see who we were because, I suspect, no one just comes walking up that hill!!
When he found out we were harmless, he offered us some water and invited us to his house. He is building his house and had just finished the lazar place -- the place of leisure, barbecues etc. The house is (obviously) on a hill and the whole valley spreads out before you. It was an incredible view!! He has a small farm with fruit trees and he gave us some of his home grown bananas. He lives there with his wife and son.
Well, we have found it -- the end of Rua Tirol!! Quite a different view from the busy street below.
Our new friend told us we could continue on the path (more up and up) and meet another road to come down.
I am sure the views are amazing along that path as well. We will have to try it!!
But we have 2 sister missionaries at home (this was in December), waiting for breakfast and probably wondering if we were lost or had some harm come to us as we were gone for about 2 hours! We laughed when we got home saying that they were ready to call the mission president to say we were gone!!
As we descended, we were passing a man in front of his house who greeted us by saying: "Good morning, president!" It turned out that he was a less active returned-missionary member of our ward and, because we were a missionary couple (our missionary badges gave us away!), he assumed we must be the president of the mission. We informed him we were just missionaries helping the president! He had never known just plain senior couples! Dennis invited him to the Elder's Quorum pizza activity that night, but he didn't come.
(Just to finish the above story)
Later, the 2 missionaries, Elder J. Rodrigues and Elder Axt invited us to join them at a home evening with Valter and his wife, Cátiane. We did take the van up to the upper stop. But had to climb another hill to get to Valter's home.
It was a really hot and sweaty climb!!
Back to our exploratory hike up Rua Tirol:
So we had some very good exercise, great views, and several fun conversations with people on the street.
It reminded me that all people are children of our Heavenly Father. They live in different circumstances, but all are loved by Him, and have the same needs and desires as anyone else.
