The Cierva Blanco restaurant
When in Paraguay, do as the Paraguayans do, right? I figured I'd probably only be in Paraguay once in my lifetime, so I might as well get as much of the culture as I could. On the next-to-last day of the conference, the conference organizers had cultural tours and restaurants to visit. I decided to do the downtown Asuncion tour and the traditional Paraguayan meal.The tour was fantastic. Our guide was a teacher at the host school who teaches history, and he's a native Paraguayan. He gave us lots of interesting history on the country with passion. We were all moved to tears when he told us about the war called the "Triple Alliance War" when Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay ganged up to destroy Paraguay and to parcel it out between themselves. The population of the country went from 800,000 to less than 200,000 and only 25,000 of those were males. Of the 25,000 males there were none between the ages of 16 and 60 left! You can imagine what that would do to a country.
Not all was sad though. We saw the brand new parliament building paid in full by the government of Taiwan! Paraguay is one of the only countries on earth that recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation, and Taiwan is aparently very grateful.
We later went to the restaurant... and I'll never forget it. For starters, we arrived at about 8:00 PM for dinner (so I'm starving!) with the plan that we would head back to the hotel on the bus by 10:30. We knew the plan wasn't working out when the waiter finally took our order at 10:05! We didn't leave until 12:30.
The food was good (and very cheap - the three of us from PACA ate to our fill complete with pop and water for $20 US!) so we didn't complain too much. The highlight of the restaurant was the entertainment (included free of charge) which included singing and traditional Paraguayan dancing. We were quite impressed when the girls danced with pots on their heads. But we were amazed when they came out again and danced with BOTTLES on their heads. Then they kept adding more bottles to the top until one girl was dancing with five wine bottles stacked on her head!
Later at that same restaurant, an attendee of the conference begins some small talk with the lady next to him. He asks where she's from, and what school she works at, of course. When she said she was from Canada, he asked, "What province?" She replied, "Nova Scotia." "That's funny," he said, "this fellow over here is from Nova Scotia too. Do you know him?" She gets my attention and asks where in Nova Scotia I'm from. I told her, Bridgewater, and she shrieked! "No way! I'm from Bridgewater too!" Turns out she went to school with my youngest brother, Aaron. Now figure the odds of that one... The girl in the center is Michele, the one from Nova Scotia. Wild huh?
Our new hammock
We've never owned a hammock before, but they are quite popular (and cheap) here, so we bought on and installed it in back of the house. Shannon and the kids love it. We took this picture thinking that Anne Geddes might want it :)
Asuncion, Paraguay
Sorry for being so long between posts. I have been away for most of last week on a conference to the capital of Paraguay, Asuncion.
The conference was a great experience. The seminars were well done, and I learned a lot professionally. I also learned a lot about the history and culture of Paraguay. One cultural experience was a traditional dance performed by the students of the school in Asuncion. Although the kids were not highly trained, the performance was a big hit. More on Paraguay to come...
Traffic in Brazil
Over the weekend Shannon and I did quite a bit of running around the city. We had two experiences that had never happened to us before. The first was coming to a traffic light that was red. Naturally, we stopped. We waited a while, then the light turned...YELLOW, and about three seconds later it turned green. So, were we supposed to proceed with caution on that yellow?The second experience was even stranger. We were heading home and an ambulance was coming up behind us with it's lights flashing. This is a common occurrance here so we didn't think much of it until we could hear the siren. We both noticed that the siren sounded really odd. As the ambulance got closer we could hear it clearly. Instead of the traditional ambulance siren, this ambulance was playing the theme song to "Mission Impossible!" This is not a joke! Fortunately, the ambulance was not taking a patient to the hospital, he just had his lights on to get people to move out of the way for him. (We know this because we saw him pull in to the ambulance station a minute or so after he passed us.)
We thought you might find these traffic anomalies as interesting as we did.
Election day in Brazil
Today is election day, and we will all be happy to see the campaign end. All of the polls are predicting the ever-corrupt populist, Lula, to win re-election here. The scandals that have broken during this election would have sent any North American politician running for cover (even in this day and age) but here it only gets a small percentage of the population worked up. Frankly I'm amazed that the country operates as smoothly as it does considering the political crooks who run this country. I guess it shows how hard the average Brazilian works to make ends meet.
We wanted to show you how politicians get the word out. These pictures show some of the more popular methods: banners and wall signage. What absolutely blew us away was that here in Brazil people routinely tear down political signage (making a huge mess) or worse, they will paint over someone's political ad and put their own ad on top of it. You would never get away with that on PEI. (They freak out if you touch someone's lawn sign!) The numbers are important for voting. Instead of having names written on ballots and allowing the voter to check the one he wantsto vote for, the voter has to type in the number of each candidate they want. This is beacuse there are so many political parties here that the ballots would be several pages long and far too complicated to put the names on them. Besides, nearly 40% of Brazilians can't read anyway.
There have been many political rallies at a preshool building on our street only about 200 meters from our house. It has made the election seem a little closer to us as non-voters.
All Brazilians are required to vote. Forced democracy sounds good on paper, but it's really just mob rule. And here in South America it has become a time of promises to the numerous poor so that the poiticians will get their vote, but then they break those promises as soon as they get elected. All in all, it's a very poor way to run a country, if you ask us.