Flying, asunción, san pedro

Greetings from the lobby of a hotel in San Estanislao (Santiní), San Pedro, Paraguay. Santiní is where I'll be living for the next few months during the weekends. During the rest of the week I should be visiting smaller communities where my volunteers that I supervise will eventually show up. Paraguay and Santiní have already impressed me--which is key to any foreign trips is to not have any expectations.

Part of the reason I'm so happy to finally be here probably has to do with how awful the trip here was. I started at 8am Friday morning leaving my house in San Diego and didn't arrive in the airport in Asunción (the capital of Paraguay) until Saturday around 9pm. I had a 9 hour layover in Buenos Aires which was such a tease; luckily my Argentine visa is good until 2020 so after my project in Paraguay I'll definitely be going back to Buenos Aires. In the airport there were beautiful porteños and brazilian people everywhere looking so put together and gorgeous as always which made me feel a little weird about my wild hair I had just cut off and sleeping on the floor in track pants. Now that I think about it I'm quite the cliché Santa Cruz girl at the moment, considering I just graduated in Latin American Latino Studies/Language Studies, chopped off my hair and ran away to South America. Either way it was nice to be surrounded by people speaking Spanish and Portuguese and eating weird little sandwiches and tiny cups of coffee.

Once I finally landed in Paraguay, a taxi was waiting for me that took two other supervisors and me to a hotel where the rest of the staff had been waiting for us. My first impressions of Asunción reminded me of visiting Cuiabá in Brasil. Also, for some reason it's super humid here right now. People always tell me Paraguay is freezing but I've been way too hot and a little mad at myself for bringing so much warm weather clothes. Most of the people in Asunción look like scenester kids and ride motor cycles while drinking tereré from wooden cups. There was also a huge group of punks outside our hotel that hung out all night playing pool down the street and were even there the next morning passed out on the sidewalk.

The next morning we got all of our bags and went to the bus station to leave for Santiní. Carrying two months worth of luggage plus camping gear is so exhausting, and should teach me to pack less in the future. On our way there we passed an outdoor market and some familiar Latin American city sights: pharmacies, hardware stores, cell phone stores and beauty parlors.



At the bus station there was a few places to eat empenadas and buy a million different kinds of maté thermoses. Here's some



The bus that finally took us to Santiní was two stories high and people would get on and sell weird shit, including chipa this weird (rock-solid) donut made out of corn meal filled with cheese. Here's a picture of me and another supervisor Tania enjoying our first snack of this national delicacy.


At the end of our bus ride we got let out in Santiní and couldn't figure out where we are--here's the fearless team trying to get a taxi to staff house.


Staff House is thankfully awesome. We're even going to get internet soon which is more than I can say for my home in Santa Cruz. The house has a well, a big kitchen, electricity and hot water and a big backyard so I'm very thankful. The grocery stores also have a lot of brazilian products and I've already bought some guava fruit and made a pot of black beans like old times. Here's a few pictures of Santiní including a psychic office and a picture of one of MANY 200 year anniversary signs. 2011 marks Paraguay's 200 years of independence from Spain, after all.