hurricane's a comin'

Sitting outside to write this blog, just for another point of view. I'm not doing too well with the regular twice-weekly updates. For now, if I can make it to one-a-week I'll be satisfied.
I can feel the rain is starting here right now which is a very good thing because today it was 41 degrees on the thermometer and the humidex was 50. For anyone who thinks they've experienced hot weather before - I challenge you to live a month here. And for all of you who are most definitely thinking "would you rather come back home to the cold?" my definitive answer is NO. I will take this godforsaken, hotter than hell, oven over that freezing cold, nasty, dirty oily slush, icy chinook-like wind, horrible winter ANY DAY. But it is still HOT here and I will still complain! It's just that you do have these moments of joy when the rain is about to come and the weather drops to a cool 25 degrees at 10:30 pm. Oh wait. That is still hot as freaking HELL. I was remembering one summer in Peterborough when the weather people were calculating how many days we'd had over 30 degree weather. Every day over 30 was an extreme heat alert. That summer there were FIVE WHOLE DAYS. I said to Ro it's funny thinking back on that because they do the same thing here, only they are calculating how many days are over 40. So far, on the thermometer, there have been 2 days over 40 and summer has only been going for about 3 weeks and ONE of those days was BEFORE summer started.
Alright, there is my rant about the heat.
I just wanted to talk about favelas for a minute. If anyone out there isn't familiar with a favela, I will explain, as I am looking at one right now. A favela is like a shantytown (think City of God - which is an actual favela in Rio, which I SAW). So actually a favela IS a shantytown, only you can't really picture what a shantytown is because they don't really have any in Canada. So anyway, Im looking at this favela and Im trying to figure out why there are so many lights that seem to be flickering on and off. First of all, try to picture a huge mountain with small random houses built all over it with no particular order to it (and by houses I mean square boxes that look like single rooms). Now picture that on each box there are several more boxes built on top of each other, maybe directly, maybe a little off to the side. Now picture that these houses look really really really poor. And all of these lights that I'm seeing are just open light bulbs without shades, and there are barely any streetlamps so the light bulbs stay on at everyones house so the view I'm seeing is a mountain with several hundred scattered single light bulbs and I think the flickering is caused simply by the wind blowing the bulb back and forth.  Are you seeing what I'm seeing?   As soon as I can figure out how to post photos onto this blog I will show you what I'm talking about.
Everyone here is also scared of the favelas.  I'm really really curious to go in one but I'm not really allowed by my family.  Even today, Ro and I were lost driving and our GPS kept telling us to turn right but alllll along our right was a huge favela.  He turned at one point not realizing we were still in Favela Land and stopped quickly saying "nnnnooope I don't wanna go in the favela, la la la".  I asked "what's going to happen if we go in?"  He said "I don't know but I don't want to find out!"  Well that makes no sense.  I think the fear is that if there is a random shooting we might be caught in a cross fire.  Seriously.
Found out how to post pictures so I shall leave you with a picture of A favela - not THE favela I'm looking at.