9/6/2005 - In Paraguay... Again

How do you know you are in Paraguay?
When you are at an internet cafe that is as slow as a dial up connection?

How do you know you are in Paraguay?
When you are typing on a standard (american,english,etc) keyboard only it is set up for spanish. So shift-9 is not open parenthesis but close perenthesis. The underscore next to the 0 is really a question mark. You just have to know this stuff.

As you can tell, I am now in Paraguay. Buenos Aires finished up pretty good. My sister and I made it to Paraguay and Smarda made it back to the states. Over all, Buenos Aires was a really good time. The amount of beef consumed this past week was crazy but delicious.

A wrap up of Argentina

We got pretty dressed up for the opera on Friday night. It was a good experience but not as great as I originally hoped. It was a german opera with spanish translation on the screen. So I was not understanding any of it. One of the funny things that happened while there is that in a perfectly acoustic theater I guess the audience is also close to perfectly acoustic. So in the begining you could hear the shhhh! shhh! And the sneezes and coughs. The other unfortunate thing was that the sometimes the music overpowered the words. Which for me was no big deal since I dont understand the words anyway. Looking back I probably should have gone to the symphony or something that required no translation at all.

Saturday during the day was spent just walking the city and eating coke, drinking beer, and the such. We went to dinner at a place that we were closed out of on Monday night. The food was spectacular. The waiter suggested a malbec that cost 42 pesos. After uncorking the wine he put it in a decanter for a while and then we drank it. The cuts of beef were also really good hand picked by the owner. The best cut of meat on the menu was 25 or 30 pesos. A great place for Annmarie to vacation.

Return to Paraguay

Sunday Amy and I flew to Paraguay and Smarda to the states. Somehow, when I flew down to South America Smarda and I checked 3 suitcases and were not over the weight limit. But when Amy and I checked in the same 2 suitcases (with nothing added) and Amy's back pack(replacing smarda's suitcase) put us over the limit. The reasoning by the staff... you are going to paraguay. Then upon arrival in paraguay, amy negotiated down the price of a taxi to her house from 150,000 guarani to 130,000. And all the cab drivers knew amy and her house. So they knew a tip was coming and were willing to drop the price. In us dollars the price for a 45 minutes went from 25 dollars to 20 dollars.

For Amys birthday yesterday we made kebobs on the grill. They were amazing. I also baked a cake with instant cake mix brought from the us. Directions called for measurements and amy has nothing to measure amounts with. So we estimated. Then it called for a temperature of 350. Amy lit the oven with a match and I asked if it was about 350. She just looked at me like I had horns and said the oven is on. You are in paraguay. On or off is all you are getting.

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