Pros and Cons. As is life.

As we are coming up on being in South America for one month, I´m beginning to really adjust to life here. However, at the same time, the absence of the delicacies I am used to enjoying from back home are making me miss the U.S. (did I just say that????).

For example, conveniently, our neighbors just began construction on their house. Of course they are adding to one of the sides of their houses, and the side they are adding to happens to be a wall which is basically attached to the wall where Kristin and I lay our heads to sleep. So what does this mean? This means at 7 a.m. for the last 3 mornings, Kristin and I have been awoken from our slumber to hammering. At what seems the exact same time, we both lift our heads, grumble, and shove them beneath our pillows. In this situation, I miss 1. The fact that houses in the U.S. do not share walls and 2. Rules and regulations stating the reasonable hours of when construction can and cannot occur.

Something else I miss about the U.S. (well, I guess this is what I miss about Seattle, in particular, where I live) I miss the lack of bugs and mosquitoes. Since I grew up on the water, mosquitoes were NEVER around and I would rarely get bit. However, since being here, I am certain when I estimate that the count of bug bites I have joyfully received would reach the 3 digit mark. “I think they like your sweet American blood” says Lilian. Well, I hope their enjoying it because they sure are getting the best of me.

Though the kids here are absolutely adorable and great, I miss my quiet time. I feel like I live in a part time daycare. Every day after the kids get home from school (which by the way, the kids get home from school at NOON here. NOON. So all you parents who wish you had a little more time to yourselves while you’re kids are at school, feel lucky. These kids come rollin in at NOON and won’t go to bed until 11!). At noon (almost to the dot), we hear a rush of kids come through the door. All 5 of them; Enzo and Ara, and then Lilian’s sister, Julia’s 3 daughters. They come into our room, sit on our beds, and just stare at us. I try and make as much conversation as I can, but if I’m not in the room, I come in and their all just staring at Kristin, and she doesn’t know what to say to them so it appears as if they are all just having a staring contest. It makes me laugh.

I miss dinner. I miss having more than one meal a day. They have a piece of bread and coffee for “breakfast” then at dinner they have a piece of bread again. I don’t know how they do it. So Kristin and I make regular trips to the grocery store to stock up on late night snacks. (Care packages with any type of good American snack would be kindly welcomed!) J

Speaking of food, a while back, Kristin and I had the wonderful idea of making food for the family. We figured that since they cook a lot for us, we can cook here and there for them! So one night, Kristin and I went to a lot of trouble (including going to the store, finding ingredients in another language and the amount necessary which were in metric units when we had a recipe with the units in OUR system. Yikes) to whip up a good batch of “American style” brownies for them. After hours of work, they turned out nearly flawless. Everyone loved them. “Que rico!!!!!” (“How rich!”) they kept commenting. We felt pretty proud and were pretty confident to continue impressing them with our cooking skills.

This is what led us to two mornings later when we thought it would be a good idea to tell them that we would cook breakfast. A good “American pancake style” breakfast. I mean, who doesn’t like yummy Snoqualmie Falls pancakes with homemade syrup??? (I honestly don’t know anyone who doesn’t). So we woke up Sunday morning, feeling confident. We worked for about an hour whipping up the syrup from scratch as well as the pancakes. After making all of it and setting it on the table, we received nothing but blank stares. Everyone at the table looked at the food, then at us as if we and the pancakes were from another planet. In order to encourage and assure them that the pancakes were in fact not poisonous, I took one, put it on my plate, spread some butter on it then some syrup and ate them with a, “mmmmmm!” After this, Maria did the typical shake of the finger “no” and basically declared that she would not try it because it was not good for her health (if you saw this woman, you wouldn’t understand why she made this decision). This was followed by Ara who took a huge chunk of butter and began dipping the entire pancake in her ball of butter. Lilian began (in quite a stern voice) telling her that she was doing it wrong and that the she needed to spread it. This resulted in Ara starting to cry followed by her exiting the table. “Hm…..this isn’t going so well….” I whispered to Kristin. Lilian had a pancake on her plate, with butter (properly) spread on it, and when I told her to put syrup on it, she said “Um…no.” Then began eating the pancake dry. I could see in her eyes that she was forcing it down (“Well of course it isn’t good if you don’t use syrup!!!” I was thinking to myself).The only somewhat positive response we had was from Silent Chief who did in fact try the pancake and gave us a thumbs up. Though he only ate about half of a small one. I cannot fail to mention that throughout all of this, Enzo never even came to the table to try the breakfast. The thought of an American breakfast did not even interest him in the least.

I sure did learn a lot from this fail attempt of cooking an American style breakfast. I learned that Americans do in fact do a good job of trying food from around the world. I feel we all have a pretty open mind to foods that are not just from our country. So good job, Americans! I also learned that not everything, even delicious pancakes, are going to taste good to everyone. We are in a different country, part, and hemisphere of the world, and we need to remember that life here is just DIFFERENT. Enough said.

About a week ago the young people of the church met up near our house to play volleyball. We all had a great time! Of course we were supposed to meet at 6, so Kristin and I showed up at 6. Come to find, 6 means 7. Right when I was thinking, “Kristin, let’s just go back home” we saw everyone arriving to play. Mental note: when an event is supposed to start at a certain time, add an hour to that time, then show up and you will be quite punctual.   

Right before we were getting ready to start, Kristin and I were sitting and chatting and watching what was quite an attractive group of guys playing soccer, when I looked out into the distance and saw what appeared as two people wearing black and white. After further squintidge of my eyes, I blurted out loud, “are those cows!?” to Kristin.

After further squintadge on her part, she replied, “Um….yeah….”

“Well why the hell are cows roamin around the soccer field!?”

We both just starting laughing and shaking our heads. Turns out, the owners of the cows (which apparently are everywhere in this somewhat urban city) just let their cows go free at night to roam and walk around to get exercise. Then later in the night, the cows will return to their respective homes. So there we were, trying to play volleyball and these cows are roamin around, laying nearby, snoozing and watching everyone go about their business. How often have you seen cows roaming around the streets of an urban city, holding up traffic? At least for me, I don’t see this often where I come from.

Can I just say that in the past few weeks, Kristin has taken a liking to several of the men around here. It doesn’t seem to matter what age they are, but it appears as if she is very intrigued by the Paraguayan men.

For example, well, I have already mentioned the fiasco(s) with our wonderful friend, Nestor. Oh Nestor. The other night at church, I think Nestor really stepped up his game when he proceeded to ask Kristin and I out on a date. Yes, true story friends. He asked if we would ever want to go out and hang out with him. He suggested going to the cities nearby falls, or going out for ice cream. To which I responded, “hm…..Im going to have to ask my family what they think….but for now….Kristin and I are going to go back home because we are hungry.” (What can I say, not a great answer, but I panicked! Rarely have I been asked out by a 33 year old somewhat creepy Paraguayan!). Fortunately, there have been no more advances on Nestor’s part.

But I tell ya, Kristin just can’t get away from good ol Nestor. Or at least, his family.

One night on the way to church, we stopped at the store to get something and we saw this cute old man walking down the street with a Bible in his hands. Kristin and I both saw him and commented on how cute he looked and how he had his little Bible and was obviously on a trek to his church. Come to find out that that little man 1. Goes to our church and 2. Ended up sitting by Kristin and I that night. Also turns out that he is 84 years old, doesn’t think it’s weird to be extra friendly to American girls in their twenties and yes of course friends, also turns out he’s Nestor’s grandpa. His name is Jose. Aye aye aye.

Unfortunately we discovered that he was Nestor’s grandpa after Kristin decided to (jokingly) have me ask Jose if he would be interested in being Kristin’s boyfriend. To which he replied with no words, simply by just raising his arms in the air sporting a huge smile, as if he had just won a million dollars. Well Jose, if you win over a girl like Kristin, you pretty much are winning a million dollars. Lucky guy, that Jose.  

What seemed to make this whole situation even more hilarious was the fact that though Jose seemed thrilled to be a potential special someone for Kristin, he seemed more interested in hooking her up with another young man in the church. After our joke with him and his ecstatic response, he actually pointed behind him to a young man named Ramon, hinting at the idea that Ramon and Kristin would actually make a good couple. I asked him why and he said that “the mix of their blood would make good children.” Not a bad answer, Jose.

But let me share a little secret with you. Out of all the men here, I think Kristin is crushin a little on this Ramon guy. (Sidenote info on Ramon: 23 years old, heart for the Lord, born with a soccer ball in his hands, current student studying engineering, current employee at Hope Christian School). Nice credentials Ramon, we’ll see if this works out, Kristin! Kristin, one word of advice, learn Spanish so you can communicate with him because I am not going to agree on going out on a date with you two with the mere and awkward responsibility of “translator.”

The stories with Kristin and the men here are not over, no no no. I cannot leave out the special connection between Kristin and Silent Chief which I discussed in a previous post. It was Ara’s mom’s birthday and for it, we all made a trek out to their house in the country to celebrate. Here, there were a lot of family, family friends, and neighbors to join in on the celebration. The music was starting to get hoppin and I suggested to Silent Chief (of course in Spanish, so Kristin doesn’t know what’s coming) to turn up the music and show Kristin a Paraguayan style dance which goes to this song. He replied by saying it was a good idea and then proceeded to take Kristin’s hand, lift her up and twirl her about the room, of course with half the town watching and laughing. Just seeing Kristin’s face of surprise as Silent Chief swept her off her feet got me laughing to the point of tears. They shared a lovely traditional Paraguayan dance for a few minutes, and I surely enjoyed every moment of it.

The other night at church, Kristin and I had a moment that brought us back home for a little bit. Every time we sing songs, the church has nice pictures as a backdrop for the words. They are usually of pretty scenery, most of which is located in the U.S. In the middle of one of the songs we were singing that night, the screen switched to a new backdrop which made Kristin nudge me and say, “Katie look at that picture!!” I looked up, and to my pleasant surprise, the backdrop of one of the songs was the Spokane River and the Spokane belltower. I just looked at Kristin with a smile and she said, “Katie! That’s Spokane!” We both could NOT stop laughing as we wondered why the church decided to put Spokane as their background. For a moment there, we both got a little homesick, but we quickly recovered. J

Last week Maria and Victor took Julia (Lilian’s sister) and her 3 daughters, Enzo, Ara and I to Itaipu. In short, Itaipu is the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world. It took a few hours to tour, and on this tour, we learned that Silent Chief used to work there! Though the facts of hydroelectricity do not seem to interest me, it was indeed amazing to see the vastness of this plant.

Twice now since Kristin and I have been here, we have been hanging out in the house and BOOM, the power goes out. For no reason at all. Every time this has happened, the family jokes that even though the biggest hydroelectric power plant in the world is but 20 minutes away, the city still can’t seem to figure out how to keep power failures from occurring. 

This is a recent add, as of just a moment ago. How ironic that as I was writing about the random power failures in the house, the power went out. ¨Shoot¨ I just thought to myself, thinking I would lose everything I just wrote. Then, something of more concern popped into my head. I remembered that Kristin said she was going to be in the shower. I got up as quick as I could, found my way to my room in the complete dark, located my flashlight and yelled into the bathroom, ¨Kristin, you ok!?¨ All I heard back in response was a laugh. For a few minutes until the power was recovered, I held my flashlight through the bathroom window so that Kristin could see what she was doing. The entire family stood by me as we all laughed at how Kristin happened to be the one in the shower during the power outage.

From left to right: Kristin, Melissa, me and Kataryn

The left side of the land is Brazil, the right is Paraguay. 

The building that is kinda in the middle of the picture is where Silent Chief worked

Sweet Melissa sleeping on Kristin´s legs on the drive back. These kids can sleep anywhere, through anything.

Last Saturday night, Fanny, a woman from the church, invited Kristin and I out to dinner. We felt very special. ;) Fanny is the sweetest lady who happens to have two of the cutest girls I have seen in a long time. Rebecca and Raquel (Rachel, in English) are their names. So adorable. As we got in the car to go out, I noticed that the car did not have any car seats or booster seats. To my surprise (but kind of not), the two little girls (ages 2 and 3) hopped in the back seat, unbuckled, as we drove off for the restaurant. I just looked at Kristin and said, “Are you kidding me? Look at them, they are both little enough to fit in one seat and they are not even in car seats or are buckled!” As we drove off down the bumpy cobble stone streets, I turned around and saw the little girls’ feet and heads bobbing to the bumps of the roads. I pray no one hits Fanny while she is driving around those girls! Kristin and I couldn’t believe how lax they are here with the safety of their kids! I felt like Fanny was pulling a Brittney Spears; she mine as well have had them on her lap up front in the driver’s seat!

 The other day I was sitting in my room enjoying my current read (titled “One Day” based on the major motion picture which recently came out to theaters starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. So far, so good) when the cleaning lady, Gloria, entered my room. Gloria is a sweet woman who seems interested in trends and fashion. I say this because when she came and said the following thing to me, I thought I was hearing her wrong. She walked in and asked me how I get my eyebrows to look the way they are. As I am sure you can expect, this question threw me off and I was certain that I misunderstood. I asked her to repeat her question and yup, I was right, she was asking me for advice on her eyebrows. In the best way I could, I explained what I did to get them to look the way they are (how would you explain this?) and then she replied by asking if I had my tweezers on me for her to borrow. Again, the cleaning lady asking me for my tweezers….wait, what did you say??? Can you repeat your question just so I know I understand?? She did, and yes, she was asking for the tweezies. Ok….I replied as I got up and handed her my tweezers. She said thanks and walked out the door with them….this confused me because for some reason I thought she had other things she was supposed to be doing other than plucking her eyebrows. Well, it wasn’t my concern, so I laughed to myself and continued to read. About 5 minutes later, she comes into my room again and asks if I have a mirror. This time I understood and I handed her a little mirror I had. About 10 minutes after this, I headed out to the kitchen to find her sitting at the table tweezing away, asking how I thought they looked. It took almost everything inside me to not laugh at this oh so random situation. How often do you give your cleaning lady advice on how to pluck her eyebrows? This one’s knew for me!

This has been a long post (surprised?), so let me end with a somewhat comical story.

I am so fed up with the postal system here. Enough said about that. Let me tell you why. Last week when we went to Iguazu Falls, Kristin and I purchased some postcards for friends and family members back in the States (family, expect yours within a week or so….but if you don’t get one, don’t be offended, you will be in the next round J) which we wanted to mail off. Last Friday, after asking several people (in order to ensure its validity) what time the post office closes on Fridays, we were given the same answer by everyone. “It closes at 5 p.m.” Ok great. I took all 10 of Kristin´s and my postcards and stuffed them in the front pocket of my USC sweatshirt. At about 3:30, Kristin and I headed over to Pastor Juan Carlos’ house to get the key from him (for his PO Box). After a few brief minutes of being lost, we found his house and got the key from him and told him we were on our way to the post office. We asked if we would make it in time (it was about 4:15 at this point) and he said, “Oh yeah, no problem. You have plenty of time to make it.” Ok great. So we set off on a leisurely stroll, making our way to the post office at a comfortable pace. After about 15 minutes of walking, I thought about things for a minute and soon realized that Kristin and I still had a ways to go until we would reach it. I turned back to Kristin and said, “Ok, I’m ganna pick up the pace, we still have a ways to go and it is already 4:30….so keep up with me.”

“Ok sounds good” she replied.

We picked up our pace to a speed walk….one which reminded me of the mom’s in their forties who walk around their neighborhoods swinging their arms about to get their “whole body moving.” For about 10 minutes, we walked at this quick pace and I realized again that we still had a ways to go, and it was already 4:40. “Dude” I said to Kristin, “I think we need to start running. I’m ganna to start running.”

“Um….ok, but…..”

Before she could finish her sentence, I took off running. After going for about 30 seconds, I turned to see that Kristin was right behind me, keeping right up with me.

“Ok good....” I thought. “We will make it now.”

Please picture this for a moment. Here are two, very white American girls in capri’s and flip flops (and I head a sweatshirt on) nearly sprinting down one of the busiest streets in La Ciudad del Este. Our flip flops going CATCHA CATCHA CATCHA as we dodged animals, children, food stands, men with their wondering eyes, and of course all the potholes on the sidewalks. After running for what seemed like only 5 minutes, I glanced at my watch which read: 4:51. I turned back to Kristin, who at this point, was about 30 feet behind me, and yelled, “Dude!!!! We have to go faster! I am NOT going to be late!!!” And with that, I took off, at a solid sprint, (or at least as fast as I could run in my flip flops) and in my head calculated about how much further we had to go. About 7 more blocks. As I sprinted in front of and behind cars, I kept telling myself, “you are NOT going to get there late after running for 30 blocks, Katie. You are NOT going to get there late!!!” As I turned to see how Kristin was doing, I realized that she was no longer behind me. For a brief second, I considered stopping so as to make sure she would not get lost (because if she did, how would she ask for help?) but that thought quickly left my mind and at the time I decided that getting to the post office on time was more important. (Sorry Kristin, priorities. Don’t take it personally ;) ). As I continued to sprint, holding the postcards in my front pocket, ignoring several of the “what the heck is that white American girl doing???” looks, I realized that in one more block, I would be able to take a left and there would be the post office. Glance at my watch: 4:55. “Ok, I will make it!!” As I sprinted my last block and rounded the corner into the parking lot of the post office, I came to an abrupt halt at the site of three words which at the time, were words which I did not want to see.

“POST OFFICE CLOSED.” 

I stood there and stared for a minute. In absolute awe, shock, disappointment, and mostly, anger. Glance at my watch: 4:56. “Ah I am even ************** early and it’s still not open!!!!!!” On top of my body feeling as if it was a car overheating, I was raging with anger.

I don’t think I would have been that mad at the post office being closed if I had simply driven there. But it was the fact that I had literally ran and sprinted for about 30 blocks to get there ON TIME to find that, oh, we’ve actually closed early. Sorry!

After standing there staring at that sign, I decided to do something about my anger. I walked up the stairs to the doors and began pounding on the door. After about a minute of pounding, I saw a woman from the back of the post office peak her head from behind a door, and as she looked at me, I pointed to my watch with a mean look on my face that basically said, “You’re not closed yet!!! Open these doors!!!!” Her response? The typical Paraguyan, shake your finger “no.” Oh boy did this get me even more mad. I glared at her for about 5 seconds before turning around to sit on the steps, catch my breath, take off my sweatshirt and cool down, in more than one way.

About a minute later, Kristin came walking from around the corner and saw me sitting at the top of the steps, with anger filled and a disgusted look on my face which still had sweat rolling down it. Her first reaction was a smile. But it wasn’t an “oh this is funny smile.” It was an “oh no…..you’re mad….” smile. She walked up the stairs and sat by me and I told her everything that happened.

After calming down for a few minutes, we got up and left to walk back home. Postcards still in my front pocket.

“Well, at least we got some exercise….and we have a better idea of where the post office is now….” Kristin said with her sweet positive voice.

Me, being the one who felt I suffered the most in this situation, just looked at her and shook my head and didn’t say anything. Positivity was the last thing on my mind in that moment. We walked back home, me ahead of Kristin, knowing that if I talked to anyone, I wouldn’t be nice.

We finally made it back home that night and I had finally cooled down and was able to laugh about it with Kristin. Especially when she revealed to me, “Katie….for a moment there, I was really scared because I couldn’t see you and this whole scenario went through my head and I thought I was going to get lost, then I would need to ask for directions, but I wouldn’t know how, then I would be stranded on the streets of Paraguay forever.”

Later that night after recounting the entire story to Lilian (and of course, she was laughing at it all, knowing how upset I probably was. She is pretty aware that I am impatient sometimes because she has seen me in stressed situations where I have lost patience with speaking, etc.). All the while, Silent Chief is listening to this story, and the one thing he had to say was, “Well you didn’t make it in time because the post office closes at 2 on Fridays.”

Oh. My. Gosh.