Saturday, January 21, 2006

Around the House

Hooray, our original blog site appears to be functional again. Thank you for your patience as we move back to this blog again.

We've gotten several comments already from people who think that our home in Brazil is beautiful. We certainly agree. However, the inside is not nearly as impressive as what surrounds it. This first picture shows our veranda (deck) off the front of the house. From here we can see the lake and the city on the other side of the lake. But mostly we can see the remains of the jungle that only 25 years ago was all that there was here.

This is another picture of our house from the street; it's a bigger view than the one we showed you before. In addition to our huge garage, there is enough room to park two to four cars in the driveway. You can see the gate and steps on the right. The little basket on the pole is for garbage. People put their garbage in these so that dogs and other animals don't get into them before the trash men pick them up.

This is the view of the side of the house coming up from the gate. The walkways are all tiled and go all the way around the house. The door you see is the way into the living room, but we never use this door.

Here is a view of the back of the house. We have a little back yard (big by Sao paulo standards) that is filled with fruit trees. We have lime, orange and a couyple of other trees that I'm not sure of. We also have big aloe vera plants. The neighbour has a banana tree that hangs over our wall and there's a huge bunch of bananas that are nearly ready to be harvested growing righ above our walkway. The star of the back yard is the tallest cactus plant I've ever seen. This picture was taken from the balcony of the "back room" which I will explain later.

This is the cactus plant I was talking about. It's at least 20 feet tall, and it towers over most of the other trees in the back yard.