A Very South American Christmas

So this is Christmas…

On December 10th I found myself walking from my bus stop in Asuncion to the Peace Corps Office with this song suddenly stuck in my head and I laughed out loud. I had meetings all day in the PCO with other Volunteers, as we do every other month, and I was running late as per usual. It had been horribly hot and muggy when I left my house with my backpack packed for the weekend. I had heard it was supposed to rain, so I grabbed my umbrella, having left my rain coat in my mailbox at the PCO a few weeks before. By the time my hour long bus trip into the office ended, it was pouring. We’re talking buckets of water here. Somehow Paraguay’s capital city has nearly no water drainage, so when I got off on España (the street), it was not that surprising that I was stepping into a river. The dirty city water went nearly to my kneecap and continued to threaten to steal my flip-flops as I fought to wade through it. So I did what anyone would do—took off my shoes and trudged through, crossing two of Asuncion’s major streets completely barefoot. If that doesn’t give me some sort of horrible disease, what will? Of course I had that umbrella, but by the time I got to the PCO I was completely drenched (even down to my underwear!) and, since my backpack was also not covered, had no clothes to change into. Great. So, this is Christmas.

This entire month has flown by, as have the past nearly 23. It is truly incredible. We had some movie nights for the library project, for which the municipality loaned us a projector. Is it weird that I am totally buddy-buddy with the mayor of a town of 80,000? I was told recently that it is. Movie night was a success—everyone ate an absurd amount of popcorn, and many children later reported having nightmares after watching Drag Me to Hell. (I’ll just say that the movie selections were not my call.)

My parents got here on the 18th—we started the trip in Paraguay, then went east to Iguazu Falls, then flew down to Buenos Aires where we spent Christmas week. While in Paraguay I had a little BBQ with some of my closest families in site, introduced my parents to a bunch of my PC friends, and then showed them the comedor. They were amazed by the comedor—the kids were really enthusiastic to see me (this place seriously makes me feel like a super star) and were especially pumped to receive the bouncy ball and pencil that my parents gave each of them for Christmas. (My mom apparently got stopped at the border after they saw the x-ray of her bag containing 90 nearly lacrosse ball sized balls...) We went and saw the carpinchos (capybaras) in Villarrica and met up with my friend Tomas. I also finally saw Tomas’s house for the first time. Anytime I hear anyone complain about any sort of house problem for the rest of my life, I’ll probably think of this house. It can much more accurately be called a shack. There are wooden boards as the walls, but often times these boards are separated by an inch or two of open space. We’re talking about a place that most would decide should be fixed up if it was the shed out back—and Tomas lives there without a word of complaint. Que quapo!

From Villarrica, our driver (yes, we had a wonderful driver named Caballero) took us through Ciudad del Este to go to Iguazu Falls, where we were spending a night. Ciudad del Este (City of the East) is the only major town in Paraguay not named after something Biblical—we have Asuncion, Encarnacion, and Concepcion. It makes sense that the name is such. It is generally considered the biggest and most thorough black market in South America. Name it and you can buy it there, and yes, feel free to use your imagination. So we were stuck in traffic trying to cross the bridge into Brazil for an hour or two. But all around us, things were being brought out to cars and trucks in bulk. Though it was the middle of the afternoon, it was easy to spot a bunch of sex workers wandering throughout the traffic. Motorcycles and motorcycle taxis whizzed by and darted in and out of cars. It was quite a sight to see. We finally made it over the bridge and into Brazil, which we had planned to cut through on our way to Argentina, and weren’t stopped at all at the border. Twenty minutes later, when we were leaving Brazil to enter Argentina, that became a problem. It took some finagling to convince the border patrol not to send us back to the bridge to get stamped, but I’m happy to report that no money changed hands.

Iguazu Falls was amazing. I had heard other PCVs talk about it, but there is truly no way to describe how spectacular the Falls are. We stayed in the park on the Argentina side, so we’d have drinks or dinner while watching and hearing the falls in the distance. The nice thing about what is sometimes called “Niagara on Viagra” is that they allow you to explore the falls so completely—you get to walk out right near La Garganta del Diablo (the main falls), or walk out throughout the upper circuit to the tops of others, or go down through the jungle to be at the bottom level and look up at the falls all while surrounded by birds, lizards, monkeys, armadillos, and some weird rodent thing I don’t know the name of. My mom and I decided to do the boat trip where you get right under the falls. We got totally drenched, and the lifejackets smelled strongly of BO, but it was excellent. If, whoever you are, you have the opportunity to go to the falls, take it, and give yourself two full days of exploring to do it.

Buenos Aires was excellent as well, of course! This was my third time, which seems slightly excessive, and may be, but each time was quite different since I went with different people each time. BA is simply a city I could easily live in for a year or two. We had delicious food and wine, walked around a lot, and just explored. Restaurant highlights were: Don Carlos in La Boca (he just brings out plates and plates of food without asking what you want), Ceviche in Palermo (with hands down the best ceviche any of us had ever had and solid sushi), and Rio Alba in Palermo (with Raul, a great waiter, who would flat out tell us when he thought we shouldn’t get something and then bring some other deliciousness). We had so many delicious meals, but these stand out. We also spent a day in El Tigre, which is a river delta town about an hour north of BA that I adore and that we explored by boat. Another day was spent in Colonia, a historical town in Uruguay that is about an hour’s ferry ride away from BA. It was pleasant, but didn’t knock my socks off.

In South America fireworks are a big part of Jesus’ birth. As are watermelons. This may seem strange to a North American reader, but it’s true. In each nativity scene you see (in Paraguay and Argentina at least) there is a watermelon present. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it is peak watermelon season down here, or maybe North Americans just have it totally wrong to not include the watermelon. I won’t attempt to argue that fireworks actually were present for the birth of Jesus, but maybe there were some sparklers at least? At midnight on Christmas Eve, just after my father and I watched possibly the worst Christmas movie EVER, and after the three of us had read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the fireworks began. We stayed in a great apartment in Palermo on the 13th floor, and had views out of three sides of the building. In every direction (well, minus much in the Rio de la Plata direction) there were firework displays. We’re talking about thousands of people setting off fireworks at the exact same time all over the city. I’m not a huge fireworks fan, but it was truly beautiful and impressive that though there was obviously no official coordination, everyone knew to set off the fireworks at midnight.

So I got back to Paraguay yesterday afternoon, to find that my fridge door had opened. I was having some trouble with it right before I left, so I duct-taped it shut. Apparently I didn’t duct tape it well enough, and I came home to find it partially open, the freezer full of ice, and the fridge completely drenched with water from when the ice melted. So I unplugged the fridge, and went to work with a little bit of hot water, and a lot of machete to chip away at the ice. Yes, I know that I could have waited for it to thaw. Yes, I know it isn’t a good idea to hack at something filled with Freon with a machete. But I just wasn’t feeling very patient. That is the really what it came down to. So after a lot of very productive machete-ing, one bad swing resulted in a stream of smelly gas shooting towards me. I went to my neighbors (the same who help me with everything, from the broken water pipe to those grotesque cats behind my fridge) and they called a guy they know. He came last night to start working and is back today to hopefully finish the job. I honestly wish that I had a picture of his face when I told him what had happened. Apparently everybody everywhere knows that taking a machete to your fridge is asking for trouble…