Friday night, some of us went out for pizza and beer. ¡Que Americana! Though at least the pizza wasn’t your typical American pizza, and we drank Paraguayan beer. Well, we started with Paraguayan beer; it’s really not all that good. Some interesting notes about beer: first of all, the bottles are huge. You can order a beer, but they bring you a one Liter bottle! That was more than I’d bargained for. Even more strangely, they bring beer out to you in buckets of ice, like they do with champagne in the States, and pour it into cups for you (which I guess makes some sense, considering the size of the darned things!) and then leave the rest in the bucket.
Saturday night, we all trekked out to the middle of nowhere for a feria (fair) one of the comités was putting on. The fair was a fundraiser in case they were unable to make loan payments for some reason, and to allow them to have a little extra spending money for Christmas or emergencies. Still, despite being a fundraiser, it was amazingly cheap. Each piece of food (empanadas, chipas, etc.) was 1,000 Gs. For some perspective, 5,000 Gs = $1.00. So, we were able to eat dinner for less than one dollar each.
The fair was in the street in the women’s community. There was food and sack races and a fashion show put on by the kids, and just a lot of happy energy. It was pretty small gathering and most of the people there were others from the community, but they seemed really pleased that so many people from the Fundación had showed interest, even if we were just lowly interns!
Some notes about transportation: it’s an adventure, in short! We started with a walk through Asunción. The sidewalks, like in many places in Latin America, leave much to be desired. They are the responsibility of each property owner, so they are made of different materials and are at varying levels of disrepair in front of each different property. This makes them very uneven, which can occasionally cause problems for someone who is at once still recovering from a knee injury, as well as exceptionally uncoordinated at times! Then we took a couple buses. You can hail buses from anywhere along their route as there are no designated bus stops, and you can push the buzzer and get off wherever you want along the route. Most of the time, the buses drive around with their doors totally open and whenever someone pushes the buzzer, slow down enough for them to jump off but don’t actually stop unless someone older is getting off, or a group of people. All buses in the area cost 2,100 Gs no matter where you’re going. Quite the experience!
Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of any of this…oops! I’m quite good about taking pictures of some things, but snapshots of social situations are not my forte. I’ll try to work on that.
Today is for grocery shopping and relaxing, and I think we’re getting a new intern today, so I won’t be the new kid on the block! And she’s going to be my roommate, as I’m currently the only one in the house without one.
Sounds like fun, even with an intership in Paraguay, a day off is better then working. How is you Guayani coming along? Dad
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ReplyDeleteTo my favorite literary critic:
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear about it, but I demand pictures. When you are my age, if you are like me, you will wish you had it all on film, so get as much of it as you can.
FYI, if you open a Flickr account, you can post your images there and link to them on your blog and thereby avoid any size limits imposed by blogger. I am in favor of big image files.