PostgreSQL Streaming Replication - Slave remains in recovery mode PostgesSQL 9.3.x

I cannot run some commands on slave because:
"ERROR:  recovery is in progress"

I set up streaming without archive. Initialized with pg_basebackup. Dataset has about 180GB .
This is what I get on slave when looking at relevant processes:

23378 ?        Ss     0:12 postgres: startup process   recovering 000000010000026000000083                                                             
23379 ?        Ss     0:02 postgres: checkpointer process                                                                                              
23380 ?        Ss     0:00 postgres: writer process                                                                                                    
23382 ?        Ss     0:00 postgres: stats collector process                                                                                           
23383 ?        Ss     0:14 postgres: wal receiver process   streaming 260/837D8000


Byte lag (as queried on master) is between 0 and 2000 bytes. 

recovery.conf content:

standby_mode = 'on'
primary_conninfo = 'host=SOME_IP port=5432 user=postgres sslmode=require'


What am I missing?
This is what "streaming replication" means.  You stay in recovery, so that you can stream changes from the master.  

That means you cannot run things that change the database on the replica.