Partners in crime

Now that I am settled in and shockingly domestic....house pet and all, it is only fitting that this weekend I had my first house guests in CdE (the Swinton not withstanding...she's permanent). But like a proud mom, of course I can't resist some photos of Swint first.

But this week, my fellow itinerant anthropologist Christine had occasion to be in Ciudad del Este. Which was fabulous, because we managed to convince our mutual friend Carrene (the same friend who convinced me to go to Purim with her in Asunción...and may drag me along to passover for good measure) to come visit for the weekend. A house full of ladies (and with those red curtains, scandal!), trouble indeed!

So we set off early on Saturday for Foz do Iguaçu, thinking that we might enjoy a properly Brazilian weekend (the mission: find rice and beans, fabulous latin clothing accessories, and caipirinhas). The bus started off pretty empty when we got on at the bus terminal in Ciudad del Este, which we were slightly worried about since we had hoped that there would be enough locals that we wouldn't have to hassle with customs officials at the border. Living on the tri-border means constantly evaluating how seriously to take the 'border-ness' of the border. If I were to get my passport stamped every time I make the 15min trip to Foz do Iguaçu, then I would run out of passport pages within a few weeks. Locals on buses, taxis, and individual cars never stop at the border...the bridge between Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçu is a traffic nightmare but not usually much else. But on the other hand, for me the thought of getting stopped coming back from Brazil without the proper entry/exit papers isn't particularly appealing. In any event, we were pretty happy to snap a photo on the empty bus (yay off to Brazil!!!), but also equally happy when it picked up enough passangers that we didn't stick out too terribly...and made it across without an issue.


So, Carrene (fashionista extraordinaire...all the way right) decided that I was far far too preppy to make my way in Brazil...which of course meant a shopping trip in Foz do Iguaçu for some proper accessories. First was an excellent latin american scarf (which replaced the J Crew cardigan, at least for the purposes of weekend adventures). Between that, the enormous sunglasses, and crazy paraguayan rocker haircut, I feel like I'm going native. Christine also managed a fashion transformation. She had been wearing the same clothes since Wednesday when she arrived (she thought she was only going to be here for an overnight trip...before I convinced her to stay for the weekend as my partner in crime...), so an emergency clothes-shopping trip was definitely in order. Complicated, of course, by the fact that she is rather taller than the average Brazilian. Good thing fabulous printed dresses are pretty much one size fits all. So this is how we ended up after the appropriate clothing modifications:


And the last part of the mission: relax at a pub, eat rice and beans (a delicious Brazilian specialty that inexplicably are absent 5km across the paraguayan border) and drink 'caipirinhas,' another brazilian epicurian specialty involving a healthy dose of lime, lots of ice, and cachaça (liquior made out of sugar cane). Three girls, three types of caipirinhas, and a lovely afternoon!


And even better, got to try out one of my other new scarves during a a walk around the lake on Sunday with Carrene. I'm going to have to embrace the latin styling. And maybe get a wee little scarf for the Swint too!

On being a complete softy!

The corgis are going to kill me!

So I did a completely stupid thing. There is a running path that goes around the Lago de la Republica (big artificial lagoon in the middle of CdE)...about 4km around, so a perfect place to go for a jog outside. If one doesn't mind dodging the packs of committed walkers--most women that I've met in Paraguay seem to believe that sweating (and by extension any activity that induces sweating) is rather unseemly. But they are very serious about walking, which makes running a bit of a challenge. Right, so headed out towards the lake at about 4:30 on Monday afternoon. It had cooled off a little bit and looked like it might rain (which felt good...it's been blazing hot!), but I was in a bit of a mood since it had been a long day and my allergies were *killing* me! Blah. Made it almost to the running path when I happened to see a forlorn looking little kitten perched atop a pile of bricks in an empty lot. Usually I can hearden my heart to these sorts of cases since there are stray critters all over the place, and I know that I can't save them all. But it sat there and looked at me. And looked at me. And out came a little chirping meow. And I stopped and turned around. And it wandered over to say hello, and was super curious and friendly. And I scooped it up and walked home with it...feeling pretty rediculous carrying a baby cat scrunched up next to my heartrate monitor while wearing my wee little running shorts, which cause a bit of a scene anyway, not to mention the carrying a scruffy stray cat part. So I brought her home, gave her a good scrubbing in the sink (which she was unhappy about, but was a marked improvement!), after which she gulped down a saucer of milk and promptly fell asleep. Which of course didn't last long, being a kitten after all, was soon perched on top of my head watching me type. What have I done?!! But she's so cute... But what have I done?!!

So now I'm a proud owner of a cat (yikes!). I think I'll name her Swinton after my favorite gangly, awkward, and vaguely alien-looking actress. Found a vet in CdE and got de-wormer and kitty litter (the essentials, for now). Oh, and of course proper cat food (milk was just emergency rations, though Swinton didn't seem to mind. She's a good little eater. I guess that being a scrappy street kitty isn't conducive to being picky). And read up on international kitty travel...which isn't as hard as you might expect, as long as shots and whatnot are up to date.

Oh, and not a word about my red couche(s). They were seriously on sale because the color was described by the sales assistant as "rather bold" (i.e. impossible to sell). There were already these weird painted red panels of stucco in my living room. So I bought red and gold curtains to match (thinking it would add some color)...before I found the cheap red couches. The whole effect, taken together, is rather that of the boudoir of a 'woman of ill repute.' But luckily it won't be too much of a tragedy when Swinton claws the crap out the couches, since they are god-awful ugly anyway. Maybe I can find some nice neutral-colored throws to disguise some of the scarlet.

But all in all, domestic life is coming together (housepet and all). I really like my barrio a lot--spent an evening sipping Caipirinhas with my landlady and all of her female kin, and got to know the folks who own a little bodega nextdoor (their daughter is studying psychology...we commiserated about the joy of writing theses). With the exception of perpetual allergies and tereré induced stomach ickies, life is pretty good!

KM 11...and about to get *really* sick!

End of the bus line for Linea 3 (Ciudad Jardín) KM 11, Amamby

A yerba mate tree leftover from when this was a big mate cultivation area. Now used for merciful, merciful shade. And random leaves to smash up and put in tereré!

There is a main international highway that connects Asunción with Ciudad del Este (and by way of the International Friendship Bridge, Foz do Iguaçu). A lot of neighborhoods for CdE are marked by their relationship to Route VII--i.e. how many kilometers outside of the microcenter you are. There is another big business district at KM 4, but by the time you at about KM 7, the crush of the commerical center has turned into cow pastures, soy fields, yard chickens and red dirt roads. Today I went with Olga, one of Fundación Paraguaya's "rural" credit assessors for the CdE office, to KM11--just 6.8 miles away from downtown but a whole different world. When I started this project I had no idea that there even was a rural part of Ciudad del Este...let alone literally on top of the city itself. It's actually so close that the area is served by the local city busses (the same ones that go through downtown, to my neighborhood in Area 3, and other places within the city proper). You have to keep a pretty close eye on the signs in the front of busses so that you don't accidentally hop on one that is headed off to the boondocks after swinging through downtown! And to make matters even more confusing for poor lost gringas navigating the tangle of buses...it turns out that north of the international route is refered to as Amamby and south of route is called Monday (after two big rivers that go through the area). Olga and I took Bus 3 (Ciudad Jardín) km 11 Amamby. So confusing!!!

So after an 11 km (but 45min) bus ride with Olga, made it out to check in with some of the "committees for women entrepreneurs" at KM11. The residents of this barrio live in what Paraguayans call a "settlement"--i.e. without proper land titles, even though the population has been there for years and years. Residents are slowly gaining state recognition by demanding connections to the municipal water grid (each house now has a spigot of potable water in front of their house) and access to electricity. Not so much a municipal sewer system though--got to use my first latrine for this trip (yes!).

Anyhow, I was pretty affected by the difference in living conditions between women living in precarious settlements and the urban borrowers that live within the city itself. So I spent most of the morning/early afternoon squatting on a stool and sipping tereré while trying to brush the cobwebs off of my very very rusty Guaraní. Luckily there were enough spanish words that don't translate easily to Guaraní (default, irresponsible, payment, &c) that I was able to hang on to the conversation...but only by my fingernails. And the sipping tereré part is about to make me desperately ill. The water in CdE is completely potable and safe to drink (most of it is processed by the gigantic Itaipu hydroelectric facility just north of the city). The leaky spiggots at KM11 seem a bit more dodgy. And the local habit of smashing up little bits of "yuyos" (i.e. medicinal herbs...or litle scraps of weeds as far as I could tell...) and tossing them in along with the silty red-ish hued water (please, please let that be from the dust!)...and then pouring it into a dank tereré cup...and then passing it around between half a dozen people...sounded like a really good way to get amebic dysentery. I'll let you know how it goes. Hopefully I'll also be able to refil by Cipra RX along with getting amoxicilin over the counter here!

The "super" just isn't the same in CdE

A few things are really really different in Ciudad del Este than in Asunción. I'm still trying to get used to the all-cash economy--which isn't really surprising given my neck of the woods, but definitely changes some daily routines. And makes me cringe every time I face down a $USD 5 ATM fee! When I rented my apartment the real-estate agent very kindly wrote down on a notepad what I would have to pay upfront: a month's rent + a month's rent as security deposit + 50% month's rent real estate tax (one time payment)= about $900. Which would be fine if I could whip out my debit card within the relative safety of the real-estate office (although from their office I could still hear the carousing of a group of guys who were drunkenly exposing their genitals...to one another...just outside the building. Didn't make me feel entirely comfortable about the prudence of making a large financial transaction right then and there, but at least it would be in the office, sans genitals, at least one would hope). No such luck--would definitely involve walking to the gas station about 6 blocks away, using their ATM machine, and withdrawing *gulp* whatever my daily ATM withdrawal limit is. And then conspicuously walking out of the ATM with a bulging wallet full of USD, back through the drunken throng, and to the real-estate office. Yikes! Luckily the real estate folks were pretty sympathetic to my anxieties/neuroses/common sense! (or just really wanted to get paid, whatever it took), so I made several trips with slightly smaller amounts. Which might have been an even worse idea, for all I know. But in any event, it makes me value the magic of plastic more than ever!

Money is pretty kooky in this city in any event--keeping exchange rates straight in my head has been rather a challenge. For example, today I paid for a Diet Coke (hadn't had any coffee and left my tereré at home...mayday!) with 2 reales + 500 guaranis. And when I bought a junky french press that cost $11.10, I of course didn't have a nickel on me, so ended up paying $11 and .25 reales. It's super-interesting to track what sorts of things get priced in what currencies (and what assumptions sellers are making about buyers when they quote one currency rather than another...and the way in which negotiating exchange rates becomes part of negotiating a good price). When I grabbed lunch at this awesome Chinese "copetín" (Paraguayan dive restaurants where you eat whatever the daily special is...or you don't eat at all) in the mini-chinatown downtown, the price was quoted in Guaranis, which seemed to suggest a local crowd, because it's usually only local residents that use the local currency. But it mostly gives me a migraine. It always astonishes me that folks with a 4th grade education can manage these pretty complex figures with such facility. Makes me feel like a fool.

But the long and the short of it was that I had a long day of moving/meeting the CdE Fundación Paraguaya office (lovely people! I'm so excited to be out of the super-stressful head office in Asuncion). By the time 5:30 rolled around and I finally finished making polite conversation with the guy who came to install my internet (for 3 hours!), I was pretty beat...and headed to the grocery store to russle up some food. Sadly, the "super"(market) in CdE is a very very sad establishment compared to "supers" in Asunción. The big box supermarket chain hit Paraguay in a similar way to the US--and Paraguayans LOVE their supermarkets. The three big chains in Asunción--Super6, España, and Stock--are laid out pretty much just like a Safeway...and often have elaborate foodcourt/restaurants/hair salons/&c attached to them. Plus, you find one pretty much every 10 blocks in the city. And weird foods like brown rice and granola are available, albeit expensive. Not so much with "super rainbow" (well, arco iris in spanish). Super rainbow is pretty sad and dingy...and definitely leans heavily towards what most people here consider 'poor people food': inexpensive pasta, white rice, and tomato paste. I found the makings for a rudimentary lentil and rice pilaf, coffee (yes!) and a $4 bottle of Argentine Malbec. Life was totally looking up. I felt like the $4 splurge was a bit decadent, but have learned from experience that anything much under Gs. 20,000 is generally labeled "red wine"...and has a rather questionable relationship to its namesake. And then I felt even more clever because I totally managed to remember to look for a corkscrew (it would be just like me to get home without one and forelornly chip away at the cork with my swiss army knife until giving up in despair). Ok, corkscrew. Usually you can find a cheap version of the ones with arms that you pull down to get the cork out. No such luck. The only thing they had looked a lot like a coat-hanger that had been bent into a vaguely corkscrew-like shape. Really, a coat-hanger? So I ponied up my twenty cents and took it home. It actually worked remarkably well (the technique involved clutching the bottle of wine between my knees and wrenched the cork out). So happy!

Purim in Paraguay

Monday at sundown was the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Purim. Being a completely non-practicing half-Jew (on my father's side, to boot!), I was of course unaware of this until one of the residents of Fundación Paraguaya's "interns house" where I am staying brought it to my attention. Carrene, being a much better Jew than me (of the keeping kosher and having facility with the Jewish calendar variety), was of course going to a Purim celebration sponsored by the local orthodox synagogue in Asunción and invited me along as well. Paraguayan Jews, who would have throught! Given the fact that I hadn't been to Purim since I was something like 7 years old, I felt like I was a bit out of my depths, but I guess that comes with being an anthropologist. And I certainly couldn't pass up the opportunity to observe the "natives in ritual," as it were.

So the festival of Purim is based on the story of Esther (married to a Babylonian king) and her cousin Mordicai (official in the court). Political machinations and an evil royal vizier --> plot to kill all of the Jews, foiled by Esther who gets the king to agree to let the Jews to defend themselves--> victory!!! But mostly it involvs giving a pack of unruly (and elaborately costumed) small Jewish children a bunch of noise makers and then asking them to sit quietly and listen to an incredibly long story in hebrew, and *only* make noise during the appropriate noise-making time. The kids had a blast. The rest of us had migrains. Luckily the robe-and-crown clad rabbi made the rounds afterwards with an enormous handle of whiskey (see blurry photo above) and a stack of little plastic cups in order to ease our pounding heads. It was a lovely gesture, though of questionable success. The best part is that the rabbi's wife immediately asked me how old I was and promptly started pointing out all of the nice Jewish boys who were here all by themselves, and goodness what a shame, and isn't it just too bad that there aren't enough young women in the Jewish community, and oh my I should really meet Ariel.... It's good to know that no matter where you go, some things never change!

Oy gevalt!

Aqui es para *vivir*

Spent Friday and Saturday in Ciudad del Este and managed to rent an apartment (yay!). The housing market in CdE is very strange--and will probably be something that I'll have to look at more carefully in the future. There are a ton of inexpensive hotels in the 'microcentro' for the tourists who visit the city in order to shop (mostly Brazilians, but also Argentines and Paraguayans coming from Asunción). In Asunción, nice hotels cost at least $40 a night (about Gs. 200,000). But hotels in Ciudad del Este go for $25-30, and have such ammenities as WiFi, good location, &c. This trip I spent the night in "Hotel Munich" (which they pronounce Moon-itch...confused the hell out of me!)...which was right down the way from "Hotel Austria" (it seems as though Germans are strongly involved in the hotel industry here!). But what is really bizarre is that even though hotels are very inexpensive, the real-estate/apartment rental market is incredibly tight--it is almost impossible to find an available apartment in Ciudad del Este. Which seems to be a way in which the residential side of the city is strongly differentiated from the tourist/consumer/traveler side of the city...they are very separate worlds within the city. So there aren't listings for apartment in the local paper, and the real-estate agents who list online have a really high turnover of places (apartments don't stay on the market very long--yikes!).

So I got ahold of real estate agent and she showed me a few places in the city, which was really helpful since she gave me an informal tour as well. It was funny how quickly she pegged me (correctly) as a nervous wealthy foreign academic and carefully geared her tour to show me all the sorts of places that would appeal to somebody just like me [i.e., the supermarket, gym, pharmacy, restaurants, pub and discotec...maybe I'll pass up the discotec, but the rest was impressively spot on :)]. She made the taxi driver go up the nice streets so that she could show me how quiet, safe, and residential the neighborhood is. And show me how close the bus-stop towards the microcenter was. It was very carefully orchestrated.

But, she did a great job with her pitch because I found a lovely place! It's in a building where the ground floor is small shops (a stationary/photocopy shop, a small office) and two apartments on the second floor. Sra. Modesta (for whom the building is named, i.e. Edificio Modesta--there are very strange naming conventions here...*every* building that is bigger than a single family dwelling, and then even some of those gets building name...crazy!) lives in a house behind the shops/apartment, which makes it feel safe and homey. She has already kind of adopted me (mostly by trying to feed me tereré and tell me all about her family), which is fabulous, since it will be a great way to get to know the city. But the place has two bedrooms and a little spare room/office; big kitchen (with a soon to be installed fridge and stove...doesn't come standard in most Paraguayan apartment rentals, yikes!!); nice bright living space; and a deck above the garage where I can put plants and a patio furniture. Yay!!! And one of my fellow anthropologists will probably be bunking with me for 2-3 months starting May/June-ish, so hopefully I won't be knocking around the place all on my lonesome for too long!

So my camera decided to abruptly run out of batteries but I snapped some pictures with my camera phone. They aren't great quality (and don't do it justice), but it is what it is. And Sra. Modesta has decided that it will be her mission to help me furnish the place by dragging me around to all of the used furniture shops in Foz do Iguaçu, so hopefully it won't be this cavernously empty for long. P.S. suggestions about what color to paint the red panels in the living room would be greatly appreciated. Right now they are rather, erh, bold...I was thinking a bright sunny yellow for the whole room, but don't know. Hrmmm.

Tereré and ñandu

Most of my adventures in the past week have been in the Paraguayan National Archive...which is a fairly haphazard but very complete collection of paraguayan daily newspapers dating back for awhile--at least to the 30s. There are no search-functions or databases, of course, so you pretty much have to ask for a month at a time and they come as a huge stack of yellowing newsprint bound up in bailing twine. Plowing through just 3 months in 1995 (looking at one of the recent banking reforms following a financial crisis in Paraguay) made me feel like a real researcher.

But I have to admit that one of the real reasons why I was in the archive was because it was too blazing hot to do anything more athletic than page through newspapers. And the reading room was airconditioned. So...the way that Paraguayans live through the heat and stay hydrated in the 100+˚F weather is by drinking "tereré" (yes, pronounced phonetically)...a cold infusion of 'yerba mate' tea leaves. And the customary way of drinking this stuff is to buy an ellaborately decorated leather-covered coleman cooler (one of the small ones that holds like 2-3 liters), stuff a "guampa" (wood, horn, or metal vessel) full of mate tea, shove a metal straw in it (called "bombilla", and continually pour/drink ice-water out of the whole contraption. It always makes me laugh to see *everybody* dragging around these strange leather purse-like thermos things, which they use to make tereré (often a communal activity, too...icky sharing straws! At least with hot yerba mate, there's boiling water involved so I can delude myself into thinking its less germy). And the best part is that mate is both a stimulant and a diuretic...which means that when I drink it I'm completely hyped up (worse than coffe!) and have to pee every 5 minutes. I can't imagine how this turned into a national obsession. But I finally buckled down and bought the whole kit and kaboodle, as it were...it has been over 40˚C for something like 4 days straight and I'm starting to melt. I hope to be well hydrated and, erh, cleansed too.


But today I braved the heat to take an excursion out to visit Fundación Paraguaya's self-sustaining agricultural boarding school. It has about 170 students in residence that spend half of their days in class studying for a high school degree and the other half working on one of the school's 17 different microenterprises (ranging from the farm, to running the hotel that is on the propoerty, to making cheese/yogurt, &c). Which means that the school completely pays for itself, which is amazing (especially since it is far better equipped and much more rigorous than paraguayan public high schools). But on my tour, I got to meet the school mascott, a native species of bird called a "ñandu"...which I gather is a south american ostritch (wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%91andu). And apparently this one is very friendly but is known to attach people wearing jewelry--I was warned about my earrings. But being aggressively pursued by a curious gem-thief giant ostrich was pretty much the best thing that happened to me all week.

Mos Eisley Spaceport...

...you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
--Obiwan Kenobi, Star Wars IV

And that pretty much is how I felt when I landed in Ciudad del Este on a brief 'scouting' trip this weekend. A 220 mile trip of course translates into a 7 hour bus ride (there is no Paraguayan equivalent to the Autobahn of course), so I arrived just as commerce was winding down...most stores as well as semi-formal and ambulant vendors work from 6am-4pm. But it was great to finally meet the city I'm going to be inhabiting for the next year or so.

Here are some photos that I quickly snapped while walking around on Saturday. CdE is not the most savory locale, so being a wide-eyed (and very white) tourist wandering around with a camera is not the brightest idea...so I tried to make my photo-ops as discrete as possible.


This is the city skyline (the 'microcentro' as the locals denominate it) as seen from the Brazilian side in the comparatively well-manered and orderly Foz do Iguaçu. The Brazilians just opened up a brand new customs/immigration facility on their side of the bridge, which has dramatically reduced traffic back and forth between the cities. It used to be a common site to see pedestrians, motor-taxis, and kombi-buses precariously loaded with tons of products destined for Brazil. This looks really quiet compared to both 2003 and 2006 when I last visited.




Shopping "Monalisa"--one of the mega-import luxury good stores on the main avenue of CdE. They have an entire floor of imported perfumes. And a baby grand piano to serenade you while you decide between the Lacoste sunglasses and the Kate Spade bag. Owned by the incredibly powerful Zacarias clan (one of the original Lebanese families to arrive in the zone), the Shopping Monalisa represents the rediciously high-end products available in CdE. The cheap Adidas knock-offs available at all of the street stands are the opposite end of the spectrum.

Entering CdE from the "Puente de Amistad" (Friendship Bridge) from Foz do Iguaçu. Traffic is chaotic even at the end of the day when things are winding down. Scooters are particularly aggressive.
The free trade zone (FTZ) has a large number of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Lebanese and Syrian immigrants who run import/export businesses...usually trading in electronics and domestic appliances. And of course Chinese textiles. "Casa China," "Shopping Taipei" and other big wholesale markets are common in the commercial 'microcenter'.

The large indoor gallerias are barely visible through the explosion of street stalls that crowd out the sidewalks and spill onto the streets. It is almost impossible to walk through the city without constantly walking through these small stores, which can be pretty overwhelming.



And returning to Brazil the next day...a beautiful view of the Paraná river over the friendship bridge. It will be a tough decision about where I am going to live. Foz do Iguaçu seems much less dangerous and certainly a lot more habitable (i.e., I had a great sushi lunch on Sunay in Foz before taking the bus back to Asunción). But a big part of this project is about the chaos of Ciudad del Este (and how people *do* manage to make it habitable)...so living in Brazil would be counterproductive to my research project.

Decisions decisions...

In any event...back in Asunción and continuing to pester the head office of Fundación Paraguaya.