Thursday, July 6, 2006

In look and feel and taste, Paraguay is unlike any country we have visited so far on this trip. There are two official languages, Spanish and Guaraní, the language of the indigenous people. But walking around Filadelfia, you're as likely to hear splashes of German as Guaraní or Spanish, and maybe even more likely. Filadelfia is the capital of the Fernheim Colony, the largest of Paraguay's three Mennonite colonies. Most of Paraguay's population is Mestizo, but Filadelfia is full of big-boned, white-skinned, blonde-haired German Paraguayans.

Last night we ended up at the Hotel Safari, on recommendation of the concierge at the fully-booked Hotel Florida. The Safari had the appearance of a '70's-style motor lodge, a sprawling one story complex with ample parking in front of each room. We took one of their more expensive rooms ($24 USD), with air conditioning and cable.

The bathroom has a bidet, which Michael was immediately fixated with, but it also came with a few large spiders, unfortunately positioned right over the toilet. So I quickly looked up the word broom in my pocket dictionary and then went back to the office to borrow one.

Though I clearly said "borrow," the girl who'd checked us in insisted on coming to our room to remove the spiders for me, and we all had a good laugh about how I was afraid, but she wasn't afraid, and Michael wasn't afraid either, because he's very grande y fuerte. This girl was really very sweet and funny.

And since she was there, we asked about the television, because we couldn't seem to change the channel. That's when she explained to us that with cable there were four channels: Movies, Sports, and two local channels, and if we wanted to switch between them, we should just feel free to call her at the reception desk and she'd do it for us from there. But only until 10:00 p.m., because that's when she goes to bed.

I calmly thanked her for the information and assured her that we were happy with Movies (an American crime drama dubbed into Spanish and shown in black and white), but when she left the room I collapsed in giggles and couldn't stop laughing for anything. ("Hello? Excuse me, can you turn to Sports? I want to check the score. Ok, now can you go back to Movies? Wait, the commercial is still on. Can you put on the local channel for a minute? Ok, now go back to Movies. But why not? It's only 9:57!") Clearly this setup is not for the short of attention span. Just as well. We don't really need to be watching TV.

Michael had obtained some guaranies (the local currency) in Santa Cruz, but we didn't have enough to buy ourselves dinner and Filadelfia has no ATM. But that same nice concierge told us that the folks who owned the Hotel Safari also owned another hotel down the road, which had a restaurant, and if we went over there we could have our meal charged to our room at the Safari. Perfect.

We had a reasonably good meal (I say reasonably good because we are a little tired of fried food) and a big bottle of local beer and we had enough cash to be able to leave a tip. And then we went back to the room and crashed out. It had been a long, long day on the bus, and a long night on the bus before that. The bed was a good one and lying down absolutely horizontally was heavenly.The fan stirring the air conditioning around was incredible after the stuffy bus air. Our window was closed, yet there was so much air in the room, it was amazing.

The bed was huge. A king, if it was a standard size, but I wonder if it was even a little bigger. Anyway, it was great to have some space to myself. Michael's great and everything, but after twenty-four hours of being squished together in the same two bus seats, one begins to long for a little space to stretch out. Maybe it was just compared to the bus seats that the bed seemed so huge.

This morning Michael recovered before I did, and he headed out to get money and explore Filadelfia a bit while I shamelessly slept in and luxuriated in being in a bed and not on a bus. He came back in the early afternoon with a selection of local foods that he'd picked up from the big German supermercado. There was drinkable yogurt, roasted chicken, empanadas, some grapes, and sopa Paraguaya, which is a very heavy, dense, savory corn bread with cheese and onions and other stuff in there.

Late in the afternoon we went out together, and I marvelled at everything Michael had already seen. The concrete sidewalks were wide and the dirt streets were wide and they formed an enormous, perfectly straight-lined grid. The majority of traffic consisted of motorcycles and scooters. The signs were all in Spanish and German. There were white people everywhere, but they were all locals. We didn't see anyone in Mennonite clothes. Some of the Guaraní women were wearing ankle-length velour skirts, which at first glance appeared to be part of traditional dress. On closer observation, it turned out that many of them were printed with enormous images of Tweety Bird or other licensed cartoon characters.

The supermercado was an enormous brick building selling everything anyone could need. I got distracted by the large selection of decorative candles, but in the end we just bought some cheese and crackers. We sat outside to people-watch (and be watched.)

After a while we strolled down the street until we came to a bookstore. We both really miss spending a couple of hours randomly poking through bookstores and we went in purely out of habit, though we had small hopes of finding anything in English. But we did. There was an entire section of well-used young adult English language books and I got sucked into an old copy of Blubber by Judy Blume, until the store closed.

Filadelfia so far is like a breath of fresh air, a completely new and different place that has woken us up from the stupor we've been in and renewed our interest in discovery. Which is a good thing to know if we ever get stuck in another travel rut - going someplace completely different will snap us right out of it.

 

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Avenida Hindenburg, Filadelfia.

Traffic on Avenida Hindenburg, Filadelfia.

One of Filadelfia's bigger side streets.

School Crossing, Filadelfia.

La Cooperativa.