Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Paraguay Days 4 and 5

Wednesday, day 4, was mostly spent waiting. Darin was supposed to have an interview first thing in the morning. He ended up waiting for about an hour and a half and the guy never came. After waiting so long we went out to lunch at a really yummy pasta place (Belini). It was a pretty cool set up where you got to choose the kind of pasta and sauce you wanted and then 8 ingredients to go in it. Ñoquis were one of my favorite dishes on my mission so I was very excited to eat them again, in South America. 

 We walked around the city a little after lunch and saw some more cool artwork/graffiti.
 We went back to the hotel in the afternoon because Darin was supposed to meet someone else in the lobby, who also never showed. It was kind of a weird day of lots of waiting and disappointment with people not following through on their appointments and Darin getting a review back on his A paper that wasn't as great as he had hoped. I was losing it with the slow internet issues since ideally I would have gotten through a lot of work during that time. We both needed some fresh air and an attitude check (mostly me...) so we went up to the roof of the hotel and sat and watched the sunset together. This was actually one of my favorite moments of the trip. We both expressed our frustrations and then moved on from them and enjoyed the beautiful evening we had together looking over the city. The weather was perfect, which was also a huge plus.
 A little later--Paraguay dinner time--we went back to Lido Bar, where we had eaten a few days earlier (and loved). I got a Lomito (thin meat) sandwich and Darin got Marinara (kind of like Milanesa, but breaded meat in a flour batter, opposed to breadcrumbs). We also got this tutti frutti juice which was THE best juice we had the entire time we were down there. It was kind of funny how it happened. We were asking for juice with a mix of a bunch of different fruits and the waitress was like, "Oh, you want the tutti frutti?" We had seen that listed but it didn't even catch our attention because when I hear tutti fruity in the U.S. I think lots of sugar and artificial flavors. That is not how this juice was at all. It was AMAZING.

 The Panteon de Heroes at night. Looks like such a cool building, I'm so sad we didn't get to go inside. 
After dinner Darin had an interview with the person that no showed him that morning. That was a nice ending to the day.

 On Thursday, Darin went to a cafe to meet up with someone, who again, didn't show up. We went and grabbed some empanadas and then walked to the Museo de las Memorias (Museum of the memories).
 Love watching all these people sell chipa in the street. Chipa (cheese bread) in paraguay is not what I had expected. It was one of my favorite things to buy on the streets in Argentina, but it was way less cheesy and much more floury in Paraguay. I actually didn't really like it much. 
 This museum was all about Strossner's dictatoriship, which is what Darin is studying, so it was extra interesting for that reason, but was also really really sad. The museum is in the building where they held people and tortured them. There was an area with actual cells that I couldn't bring myself to go in. Seeing the lists of people, and especially kids who were tortured/killed was really hard.






After the museum, we tried to go to a fine arts museum that was on our way home, but apparently the location had moved and it was really far from us, so we did a little souvenir shopping instead. 

That evening we went over to Alia and David's house for pizza and then they took us to the bus station to get our tickets for our trip to Argentina the next day.  As soon as the people in each of the different bus companies sees a person, they start yelling out things like, "Going to Argentina, buy your tickets here!" or "Tickets for Brasil here! Come on over here!" The competition between the different bus companies was REAL. So interesting. 

We followed Alia's lead and chose a company and our day/time of departure. When Darin went to hand the guy his CC, the dude said, "Oh, you are paying by CC, that will be more expensive." He took back the already printed out tickets he had handed us and started typing on his computer. We tried to fight it because there was no sign stating this policy, and the tickets were already printed, but he was firm and charged us more to pay with CC. 

I went to bed super anxious/excited that night. I couldn't stop thinking about our trip to Argentina the next day!!

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