There are still so many cool pictures from South America that I'd like to share with you, my friends, just haven't gotten around to it. Well, without further discussions, here goes.

The following pictures were taken in Brazil.

Have you ever seen red bananas?




And this creature is supposed to be a butterfly:




How about a monkey? My Russian readers would understand that when we think about Brazil we always think about monkeys:




Aren't they just so funny looking?



And finally, a toucan, just chilling:

Cataratas do Iguaçu in Portuguese or Cataratas del Iguazú in Spanish are located right in the Brazil/Argentina border. Truly I haven't seen anything this amazing:



According to a legend, G-d planned to marry a beautiful aborigine, but as all love stories go, she wanted someone else, a mortal lover, with whom she fled in a canoe. In rage, the god sliced the river creating the waterfalls, condemning the lovers to an eternal fall:



The falls are much bigger than the familiar to all of us Niagara:




Two hours flight from Rio or Buenos Aires gets you to this little paradise. If you are ever in Brazil or Argentina, it is defiantly the place to visit.

I just returned from a trip to South America. In the next couple of weeks, as time permits, you, my friends, will be subjected to my stories and lots of pictures. I would like to begin with favelas.

Favelas are shanty towns. The houses sit right on the mountain slopes build by the owners on public lands.


The higher on the hill the house is, the cheaper it is, as you can imagine, reaching that house would be very difficult.



The streets are very narrow and dirty. The trash is everywhere.





The smell cannot be described. Open sewer canal runs right in the middle of the favela, right next to the main street. Most people don't have glass in the windows and the smell of food is everywhere. Now imagine sewer smell mixed with the smell of food being cooked everywhere and bake it all just a little bit under the hot Rio sun and you got yourself something amazingly stinky and nasty.





Before going to one I said to myself how bad could it be? But I truly did not realize how bad it really is. The electricity is obtained by illegal means with wires going to every each directions from one poll. It's simply amazing how they don't catch on fire:





Every forth Rio inhabitant lives in a Favela. It hard to imagine, but it's an unfortunate reality.



Here are a few more images. A "tree house":



And the kids :(