City Hotel & Restaurant Asuncion

Hello everyone! I know it has been many months since I last sent out a blog update. I never even wrote about my trip to Brazil with my mom back in April! I will do that in a separate blog. I've become fully adjusted to living in the city and extremely "delicada". The overly crowded, loud bus rides to and from work no longer bother me. I enjoy having the freedom to have a pizza delivered to my apartment or to go out dancing on the weekends or out to dinner if I ...

... my Bolivian and Peruvian reflexes came back on a hurry, and I quickly found my marks. It's been quite a mess to get to the bus terminal, and a nice chaos finding a bus going to Asunción! The bus was thoroughly dirty, thoroughly slow, thoroughly hot under the sun, and to do 300km it took 8 hours. And once again little peddlers came into the bus to offer food and drinks. It was funny coming back to all that, like meeting again an old friend who can be a pain in the neck sometimes ...

Iedereen krijgt een tweede kans om een eerste indruk te maken, en Paraguay greep deze met beide handen aan. Paraguay is niet de chaos van een Indicase stad (nou ja, Ciudad del Este misschien wel), maar een prachtig groen land, met merkwaardige extreem hoge rotspartijen, veel open velden en langs de wegen afwisselend stenen en houten huisjes, waarin de mensen hun eenvoudige landelijke leven leiden. Geheel anders is Asuncion, de hoofdstad. Het is een stad van enorme tegenstrijdigheden ...

... kicking ourselves. Chile's pacific coast line had been on the cards but after some reading and asking around it just wouldn't be possible in the short space of time we had. Sometime spent flicking through the guide books and discussing our options it appeared Asuncion was the best choice. It seemed small and not too distant, but also afforded us the opportunity to finally get some more stamps in our passports. So, as quickly as the decision was made, we threw our books in our ...

Recently we have had some very long drive days, playing cards and sleeping. Charlie has been nicknamed a nodding dog, due to her lack of neck muscles when asleep on the truck! After La Paz we drove to Potosi, a mining town and travelled a day to Uyuni, nothing to see there just a transport town, but the hotel restauraunt claim to sell the best pizzas at altitude, Jim felt he should try one and successfully demolished an extra large pizza! the following day we ...

... big plazas and the typical mix of the haves and have nots. what surprised me is how much the haves have, it seems like ever car in the street is a benz or some sort of luxury automobile! One big change compared to argentina is after dark there is no one on the streets and as well there are armed men (police or private securty) on virtually every corner which made it feel almost more like central america then south ...

... Villa" (our little neighborhood), then a short camp with all the kids from town (we had a big water fight), and finally a big barbeque and dance for the whole town. In preparation for the barbeque we spent the whole day butchering, processing, and consuming pig products. For breakfast there was tripe, followed by pork rinds (the residue from boiling fat to produce lard) for snack, then blood sausage and boiled pig head for lunch. I'm not ...

... a change in the weather. In the evening it started to rain, and just before the bus pulled up to the gate in Antequera it started pouring really hard, so here we are running for the bus in the pouring rain, and then once we were on the bus, the rain almost stoped. It was a nice bus comfortable and not to cold, about 4:30 in the morning a lady came on the bus with warm Chipa (I don´t know if you ever had it while you were here it is a type ...

... ist mir das Getränk sympathisch, denn alle, wirklich alle lässigen Typen hier haben einen Guapa umhängen. Allerdings sind das glaub ich auch genau die Typen, die das Produktivitätslevel so unterirdisch niedrig halten. Man kann eben nicht alles haben. Im Moment würde ich aber offen gesagt lieber zu der Téréré-Hanger-Fraktion gehören. Die Temperatur hier wird nämlich langsam unangenehm. Während ich in den ersten Tagen noch mit Pulli schlafen musste ...

... s beverage probably cost me a good few years of an already short life expectancy... The walk back was otherwise unremarkable. The poverty is evident down nearly every road I walked past, and if you do fancy re-creating my travel day for any reason then walk around the dodgiest area in your local town (only after digging the roads up and blowing up the houses), insist that everyone speaks in a language you can´t understand and breathe in fumes from an exhaust pipe every 20 yards or so ...