A couple more weird things and a hole in the ground

Hello again.

Ok, so I realised I forgot some of the weird things when I wrote the thing last week. So a couple more of those. Hope. you're not all bored.

The toilet seats. Apparently the toilets are super weird. Because the toilet seats are soft. The lids are the same kind of hard plastic we have in Finland too, but the seat ring thing is a foamy plastic. So it's soft when you sit on it.

The ambulances. Or actually the sounds they make. So ambulances in different countries make slightly different sounds, obviously, but I think pretty much everywhere I've been it's been some kind of long weee-ooo-eee-ooo or something. Except here. Here they make a sound that's more piu-piu-piu-piu-piu. At least to me it sounds a bit like if you shot one of those laser-guns in Star Wars a constant three times a second. Although I admit that I haven't seen those movies enough to be completely familiar with the sound effects, but at least that's what the sound the ambulances make reminds me of, even if I was wrong about what the laser guns actually sound like.

The numbering of the houses. So I live on a street that maybe about 500 m long, a small straight road. The number of our house is 300. The numbers of the neighboring houses 288 and  312 or something.
I'm assuming the logical explanation for this is that the numbers of the houses aren't based on how many houses are on the street before it, but instead on how many meters it is from the start of the road. Which I guess is kinda handy, since it means knowing the number means you can figure out exactly where a house should be on a road without knowing anything about the other buildings on it.

Ok. Moving on to other things.

I don't know what other things there are. I've spent the last week basically going to INPA and back a few times and sending a bunch of emails to get my studies here set up. The classes technically start this week, but for ecologists all of March is statistics, to which I said "yeah, no, I've done linear models already once and I did not like it even in a language I understand, there's no way I'm doing that again in Portuguese". So I have only one week of classes in March. Because here each course is all day every day for a week or two, and then it ends and the next one starts. So I don't have much to do. I've been trying to get myself into some research group that would need some extra hands doing what ever they're doing, because I was assured that here too, there is always something in research that needs to be done no one has the time to get to. So I've sent some emails about that, and my roommare (housemate?) has asked around because she actually knows the people at INPA, and no.

So basically most of what I've been doing is this:
With a book. And by book I mean e-reader. Which is the best thing in the world. In the month since I got here I've read almost 1500 pages of book (= almost three books). And that's just the first month. I'm so happy I don't have to carry all that paper around with me. Also that it's a lot easier to find things to read when you're not dependent on local bookstores.
Well, the hammock is pretty great too. It might also be the best thing in the world. Or maybe the combination.

Oh, why am I wearing a sock in the picture? (You can't actually see that I'm only wearing one sock, but I am only wearing one sock.)
Because about a week and a half ago I was just standing out there, putting up my hammock, and suddenly

my right leg is hip-deep in a hole exactly where there used to be ground a moment before.




(How annoying is it that it's impossible to get the images side-by-side here? Not even a little overlapping.

 And I have a huge cut in my heel. I didn't even notice it at first, but in about a half a minute I started leaving bloody footprints around the yard, so I was like waaait, where is all that blood coming from, and even after that I had to clean up all the blood before I saw where the cut actually was.

So yeah, I've spent the last week and a half wearing a sock to avoid getting any dirt in it. Or, well, to avoid getting any dirt even to the bandage. Because I am not excited about having an infected foot in the tropics.

But it's fine now. I changed the bandage again today, and it looks great. I can also use my entire foot to walk again, so that's nice.




Anyway.
I did go out on the river again the other day (because the city sucks, and the river is amazing). Let me see if I have any good pictures from that. My memorycard had decided after about 20 photos that I don't want to have more than that, and somehow corrupted everything I took from there on, so that all the camera and computer said about the rest of the fotos was that they can't be shown. (I did reboot the card, so I it should be working fine. But apparently all memory cards hate me now. I had to already buy a new one because my old one had decided it has only 0.3 Gb of free space when it's empty instead of the almost 8 Gb it's supposed to have.)

Here we go.

Here's an abandoned boat. (Apparently wooden boats sink quite fast if you don't check on them often enough.)

And downtown Manaus, as seen from the river.
(If you're thinking what a shame it is all there river shots are so cloudy, don't. The clouds are good. I still burnt my face and shoulders that day.)

And a bird. I have no idea what kind of bird this is, though.

What annoys me is that I almost got an excellent shot of a kingfisher, but then the boat was moving just slightly too fast for the camera to focus fast enough to get a picture. So am now left kingfisher-fotoless.





I think I don't have much more to share with you today.
(It's so nice I'm able to make these posts look really long bu adding a few pictures in there.)
I hope I'll have something interesting happening again by next week.

~matu