Monday, October 30, 2006

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?