Granados Park Asuncion

... Korean descent, among others. I think many of them (especially Europeans) came around the time of WWII to escape the rule of the Axis Powers.
- There isn't much tourism. Paraguay has no beaches, no mountains, and very little jungle, so it's hard to draw tourists when the region has places like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Valparaiso, Patagonia, the Bolivian altiplano, Tierra del Fuego, Iguazu Falls, and the Amazon.
- There ...

... to bed with serious heartburn and little or no beer when I was to awaken later shouting and banging at the door. I had this mad nightmare where I thought I was stuck on another truck having fell asleep and been left in truck park (I am shuddering as I write this as it recurred in part twice since). I began to come out of the dream as I heard blonde ruth jones at the door, who was to be fair quite nice and hugged me as I was shaking like a mad thing. Calmed slightly I ...

... til 1am. The "disco" which is just a field, was packed though. The funniest thing about the concert though is that in Paraguay young women only go out to parties and such with chaperons, so along the whole perimeter of the concert were chairs lots of middle aged women just sat the entire time as chaperons. There was a group of about 15 of us that went, and one of the women who is on my women's commission came as the chaperon for the girls. Yes ...

... nous sommes retrouvés dans un des mini-bus milk-shakes de toutes les couleurs, et nous nous sommes faits secouer! :) Et puis Luque n'est pas une ville, tout au plus un grand village éparpillé autour d'une route. Nous sommes descendus au hasard, en espérant être au bon endroit. Raté. Mais nous étions juste devant un petit magasin de glaces, alors en fin de compte c'était pas si pire! :) Après avoir savouré nos glaces, nous nous sommes remis en marche le long de la route. Nous avons demand ...

... see them play. There is some bad news in the league though, as one of the coaches of the other team was recently shot on a bus near Asuncion. He got on the bus carrying 45 million Guaranis (about $9,000!) in a sack and two guys robbed him and shot him. I don't care who you are or where you are, you do not get on any public bus carrying $9,000 in cash in a sack. That is foolish. He had been exchanging Argentine pesos from his "business" at a ...

After a busride of 5 hours I arrived in the capital of Paraguay, Asuncion. This time I was well on time for my bus because the hour changed here to summerhour, damn I could of slept an hour more :-( It was getting dark so I checked in in an hotel ...

... was super fun. For all your World Cup Elimination round updates. You will notice that PY is number one in its region... as is the US. I don't have a ton of work going on right now. Allthough I'm feeling pretty busy. The new training group of PCVs is going to come out to my site for a night this month to do a technical excursion. I've been planning that out. I also have ...

... travelers DO make decisions based on such considerations, like yours truly. And then of course some of the consequences can be a bit bizarre. While my generally well-funded ex-pat buddies in Thailand sweat and scramble to deal with new toughened immigration requirements there, a little known fact is that citizens from several South American countries can get far more favorable terms of entry there than they, all for free, including those of Peru ...

... projects started with at least one local small land holder. We also just built a gray water filtration system at our house to deal with all of the excess water we use now that we have running water. It is actually quite amazing how our water consumption rose with the arrival of running water without a rise in its need. Also, I am pretty sure we have previously written about the German hospital that used to operate ...

On Sunday we left Benito and got a private bus to Ponta Pora on the Brazil/Paraguay border. We stayed the night there and the next day we got our passports stamped out of Brazil and into Paraguay. Our destination was Asuncion, the capital city of Paraguay and apparantly the cheapest city in South America. It was also meant to be excellent for duty-free shopping. As it turns out it was ...