Concepción, Paraguay - We Are Two People Who Want to Go to Asunción By Boat

Hotel Frances's breakfast buffet is pretty okay. They had scrambled eggs with hot dog slices in them - yay for Michael, yuck for me, but either way pretty impressive because usually it's just bread and butter and jelly. The other good thing is that breakfast is served until 10:00 a.m., which is a relief after the freakishly early breakfasts in Filadelfia and Loma Plata. After this meal of mixed reviews, we went to go find out about boats to Asunción. 

Well, first we got some money from the bank. (No ATMs in town.) Michael changed cash, but I'm running out of money, so I had to change traveler's checks, which I dread. The waiting, the fee charging, the mysterious doings with my passport in the back room. Oh, well. Just a couple hundred dollars got us enormous, embarrassing wads of guaranies. It's beautiful money, but most of the smaller bills were terribly worn out, soft and damp like fall leaves.

Down at the muelle (dock), we asked at the first building we wandered into and the guys there were so polite and helpful that we didn't realize we weren't in the boat office until we asked how much the trip would cost us and they said they didn't know.

We were happy to find we were in the wrong place because they had told us that the boats wouldn't leave for Asunción until Sunday and that was very bad news because today is Monday and with only a month left, we can't really afford to sit around in Concepción for a week.

But we got to the correct office, we heard the same thing. Boats leave Sundays only. Our guidebook is really outdated. We were crushed. We should have called ahead. We decided to go back to the room and call the phone number in the book because it seemed like it was from a different company and maybe they were the ones who leave on Thursdays.

I was designated to make the phone call because my Spanish is better. I punched in the numbers and as soon as I finished the last one, I heard, "Hola?" which threw me off because, dang, did the phone even ring?

"Somos dos personas que quiere ir a Asunción en barco," I said. ("We are two people who want to go to Asunción by boat.")

"When do you want to go?" the man asked in Spanish,and my heart leaped.

"When can we go?"

"Tomorrow morning?" the man asked.

"That would be great!"

Then it all got weird. The person I was talking to asked me if I could wait a minute and he'd call. Call? Call whom? And then he hung up. I think. That beeping noise couldn't be hold music, could it? I was pretty sure he'd hung up. Was I supposed to wait a while and call him back?

Things started to dawn on me. "I think," I said to Michael, "that I just called the front desk." We couldn't stop laughing. I wondered exactly how many of the digits I'd actually beeped into his ear. And who says, "We are two people who want to go to Asunción by boat" to the front desk guy? We couldn't stop laughing.

Until the guy called me back and said what we'd heard twice before, "Solo Domingos." Sundays only. Man. I really wanted to take a riverboat trip in South America. I studied the maps in our book looking for rivers between here and Buenos Aires and cities that looked like they might have a boat connection, but found nothing. Possibly one might be able to work something out with someone if one did a little digging, but if one was going to do that, one might as well wait in Concepción for a week, mightn't one?

So Michael said we could wait. We could go to Pedro Juan Caballero, on the border with Brazil and check out the nearby Parque Nacional Cerro Corá. I'd wanted to visit a national park before leaving Paraguay, so why not do it now? It's a thought. Michael is a good guy. He knows how much I wanted to take a boat trip. All he wants is at least seven days in Buenos Aires, and who wouldn't? So we'll think about this plan.

We went to lunch. Rotisserie chicken by multiple names has never yet failed us and it's highly visible here in Concepción as well. I don't know what it's called here, but luckily you can walk into a chicken place and ask for "pollo" without having to know whether you're in a brosteria or an asadero or what. We also got an ensalada russe, which turned out to be a huge mound of potato salad with some beets and carrots in it, giving it a reddish stain.

And boiled yucca slices, accompanied by half an orange lime, which we most certainly did not order. It's starting to look like yucca is going to show up at every meal, like tortillas in Mexico or arepas in Colombia. Blech. (Now if they fried it... yum.)

Speaking of cuisine, Michael brought home a little snack for us this afternoon. He was at the Internet cafe engaged in some family drama - his sister has been taking care of our cat and now she wants to keep him - and I was in the room supposedly working, but not able to because the laptop was a) not starting up and b) giving me electric shocks, so I was retwisting my hair instead.

He brought us each a beef empanada, the dough part of which was greasy and thick and potatoey and delicious.He also brought us each a small skewer with chunks of meat alternated with chunks of something whitish. What was it? Pineapple? Potato? Some other kind of vegetable, God forbid yucca? No, it was fat. Square pieces of pure, grilled fat. Nice. I like a country that does not mess around. Because you know the fat is the most delicious part of the animal. It doesn't just have flavor, it is the flavor. Yeah, I ate every bite.

So... the questions remain. Will Michael and Megan get their precious kitty back? Will they go to Asunción by boat? Will they ever escape the dreaded yucca? Dun-dun-DUN! Did I mention that every day since we got to Paraguay we have been watching this one Spanish-language soap opera? Not on purpose, it's just always on when we are in restaurants. The ruffles! The cleavage! The sculpted facial hair! The tears! It's awesome.