Getting lost on buses, haggling over prices, and finding a good cup of coffee

I always get a little bit embarrassed when I take the wrong bus/don't know where to get off/don't know where to pick up my usual bus going back the way I came/& other travel mishaps. Luckily it doesn't happen all that often...mostly because I'm shameless about pestering the bus driver before getting on to make sure that it is headed in the right direction. Unfortunately, buses in Paraguay have the annoying habit of not really going where you presume they will go. Their front window is usually slathered with a host of confusing signs that (very helpfully) point out the major landmarks they pass en route...but not entirely helpful since they of course don't in any way indicate what order they pass said landmarks, or if it's something like a big street, how much of that is included in part of their route. Not to mention the fact that there is a 30.1/30.2/30.3/4/5/&c bus that are all slight variations on a theme...as well as the inconsistency of design/color/general markings that would distinguish one bus from another. But in any event, I got thoroughly and completely lost on Friday while trying to get downtown from my hotel. Bad directions from the hotel staff combined with incoherent grumblings from the bus driver turned into an epic hour-long ride through the outskits of Asuncion (while I got more panicky...and evaluated my options for jumping ship and finding a way back) until the bus-driver (very confused as to why I was still on his bus), turned into the dispatch lot at the end of his route and politely told me to scram (or at least as far as I could tell from the half-guarani mumblings...did I mention my guarani is far from passable?). He must have taken pity on me because I looked lost and dismayed (and thoroughly out of place)...so he stuck me on the next bus out with directions on how to get on the *right* bus headed towards downtown. Crisis narrowly averted and only an hour and a half late. So I thought I had used up all of my bad bus juju and would be free and clear for awhile...sadly not the case. Yesterday I got on the right but it totally took the wrong route. Which is when I found out that a single bus line could have radically different routes. As soon as I saw that I was (presumably) close to my destination I abandoned ship. Except that I didn't actually know where I was (or rather wasn't as close as I thought) so had about half an hour of walking to contemplate my stupidity. Sigh...getting lost can be fun and entertaining. Until you do it a few times.

I was yet again reminded of how long it takes to adjust to a new context when I had to confront what is for me one of the most anxiety-producing situations: bargaining over a price. In the states we generally tend to assume a few things about the process of buying and selling. First of all, that if you offer somebody money to do something, the hitch usually involves figuring out what price they are willing to do it for. In Paraguay, this logic often does not apply at all. A friend was describing her efforts to have somebody come to a library to fix a computer. The computer repair man told her that she'd have to bring the computer to him...impossible since the computer wasn't authorized to be taken outside the library. No amount of pestering could get him to budge, he just didn't want to do it. When I asked if she could have paid more to get him to come, she replied that "Paraguayan's don't operate on a logic of profit or money, they operate on a logic of, I don't know, crazy!" Well, maybe not crazy, per se...but I definitely need to re-evaluate the assumptions that I have about how to deal with money here. And this is totally the case with bargaining too...and why I hate it. After my epic bus mishap (and a long walk) it looked like it was about to rain so I set out in search of an umbrella. When I finally found one, the very nice and mild mannered man who was selling it asked for Gs. 12,000 (about $2.40). This sounded like pretty good deal to me, but it is pretty customary to at least put up a show of bickering over the price. But I felt really badly, because $2.40 is a really good deal for an umbrealla. *But* my dissertation project is precisely about how small businesses interact with their customers (and the sorts of social relations that develop around things like setting a good price)...so I should practice. But I get anxious. But I should try harder. But I felt badly for the guy because Gs. 12,000 is not very much. Sigh. Anyway, I was totally too scared to actually haggle with him over the price, so I politely bought my $2.40 umbrella, thanked him kindly, and left. Grrr...I've got to step it up! Same goes for things like hotel prices too (even at nice hotels that have things like websites with posted price lists and online booking). My fellow expat anthropologists working in country were horrified that I'd naively paid the price that the hotel asked for instead of trying to work a deal. So much to learn, young grasshopper.

Luckily, with the help of a fellow anthropologist working in Asunción (who I randomly met last week), I discovered a lovely little cafe right next to Plaza Uruguaya...one of the historic squares in old colonial Asunción. It's called Libreria Café, and I think I'll be a regular, at least as long as I'm in Asunción--one of the best cups of coffee I've found here. Plus it totally beats "Third World Cafe" in Hyde Park.

The whitest girl in Asunción

Stepped off the plane into the middle of the blazing tropical summer. Asunción is not quite equatorial (about 25˚S), but by dint of being located in a swampy delta, gets some fairly obscene temperatures. Before you roll your eyes (I know, Chicago has been pretty dreary this winter), imagine passing a local bank with a digital temperature read and trying to convert 42˚C to F...and realizing that it is somewhere between 105-110 degrees. And humid. Ooof! I thought that I would be ambitious and go for a short run the other day (at about 5:30...pretty hot still)...made it about a mile when I looked down and was horrified to see my heart rate had hit 198 and I had started seeing spots. But the gym at the hotel consisted of an access corridor with no window and fans...no luck. So instead I thought I'd buy a bikini and take advantage of their better equipped facilities...i.e. the pool.

Asunción is characterized by an extreme version of the sorts of urban disparities that you might expect in any large city. My hotel is in one of the obscenely wealthy ex-burbs sprinkled with mansion/compounds (with their attendent concertina wire, closed-circuit cameras, and private security forces), and close to the consumer mega-opolis called "Shopping del Sol" (with, of course, a Lacoste store and Givenchy perfumes for sale). On my bus ride to Fundacion Paraguaya, the non-profit microcredit organization I'm studying, I pass an Audi dealership, a Benz dealership, a billboard for the new iPhone...a lifestyle that is pretty well beyond my reach. On the other hand, this is the same city where it's not uncommon to see pony carts pulling wagons of scraps, or peddlers that make a living riding the local busses hawking tepid Coca-colas, used auto parts, or lottery tickets. Most people don't live in mansions, but rather in precarious structures erected from plaster, scrap metal, reclaimed wood, and whatever else is available. And even in the mansion district, the streets are most commonly "cobblestone" (a generous term...more appropriately rocks+mud), with raw wastewater running through the gutters and forming eddies around debris and trash.

But, in any event, I'm in Asunción and soon will be off to Ciudad del Este. I had a funny chance encounter with two other American anthropologists here in Asunción (both are working in the recently opened archives from the dictatorship era). One is actually a professor at De Paul in Chicago and I'd been playing email-tag with him for awhile (we never managed to connect in the states), and the other is a graduate student at City University of NY. Part of me would like to stay in Asunción for a bit longer to take advantage of their network of contacts with local research institutions, their familiarity with the city, &c. But I think it would be best to get to my primary field site and start making my own network of contacts there--plenty of time to return to Asunción and dig around in the archives (and splash around in the pool--ha!). But if you thought field reserach was all fun and games (at the pool, of course), I dragged a 300 page dissertation (in Spanish) written about CdE (Ciudad del Este) along with me.

And just to spark your jealousy--this is what $40 a night will get you in Asunción:

In aticipation of the joys of a 26 hour flight...

...with layovers in Miami, La Paz, and Santa Cruz (the later two in Bolivia, for those of you who are a bit shaky on the geography of obscure Latin American urban centers...not to worry, I had to look up Santa Cruz too).

In any event, I'm leaving for the fieldwork component of my dissertation research on Monday and will be enjoying the tropics for somewhere between 12-14 months. I'll do my best to post regularly (mostly so that my poor, dear mother doesn't die of anxiety in the interim...though I imagine that she will continue to stockpile small kitchen appliances for my anticipated return--some sort of cosmic insurance policy that I don't fully understand but benefit greatly from). I don't imagine anything too exciting will happen until I head off to Ciudad del Este, a week or two after I get there. But Paraguay is indeed a "nest of pirates and thieves," so you never know.

Oh, and I don't imagine that anything I say will be overly sensitive...but the diligent folks who oversee the ethics of human subjects research in our Internal Review Board kindly remind me that confidentiality (&c) is always a concern with fieldwork...so I'd be much obliged if you don't share this site with too many other folks. It would be silly to password protect it, but if you would kindly not link to it or share it widely, I'd be much obliged. Thanks!

besitos!
~carly