New Obsessions of South America

Our first post about obsessions was a popular one. Unfortunately for that topic, we spent a long time in Brazil, so we had no new countries to post about. Now we have some new countries again, so here we go.

French Guyana: Not doing anything. French Guyana is technically a part of France, so this one makes sense. Many people in French Guyana don't actually have jobs and are supported by the French government. But, even those that do don't work much. Despite being a popular place for French tourists, all the tourism places close for August vacation. Most of the places in our guidebook had gone out of business. Maybe because they only open for two hours per day. In short, don't expect anywhere to be open or anyone to be willing to help you in French Guyana unless they are foreigners.

Paraguay: Mate tea. The easiest one yet. It is impossible for any American to understand the depth of this obsession without visiting. Every store sells cups to drink, straws, and thermoses for this nasty tea that they drink ice cold. About 50% of people carry around these huge 2 gallon thermoses to keep ice water on hand. Booths line the streets to sell you additives for your tea, huge blocks of ice for your tea water, or to sell you a pitcher of tea. I still can't completely grasp how this tea could be so important. We saw a man in the grocery store stocking shelves with one hand and hugging his thermos with the other.

Uruguay: Cow Products. If it is from a cow, they love it. Beef with every meal, leather stores everywhere, and dulce de leche is the most common flavor. This obsession was a good one. I love beef and dulche de leche (like caramel for those who have never had it). I ate a dulche de leche pie for breakfast one morning (well, I gave Tara a bit). Yum.

Guay #1: Para!

After departing from Foz do Iguacu (on yet another overnight bus), it was off to Paraguay, where we spent a whopping 33 highly caffeinated hours (well, caffeinated if you were me, thanks to cold medicine, free coffee on the bus, and tereré, the local version of yerba mate tea, which of course I had to try). Whee!

Asuncion is the capital of Paraguay (two of the other major cities in the country are called Concepcion and Encarnacion, so you get an idea of what religious beliefs predominate). Paraguay is a small, landlocked country--it's definitely less wealthy than its neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, and I won't lie, Asuncion is not the most exciting city ever (it took about half a day to see pretty much all the touristic sites one could see). But it was cheap, and the people were very nice and spoke Spanish, which after three weeks of attempting to communicate in Portuguese, was practically like English to us.

Asuncion has a lot of flowering trees, and apparently we arrived just at the right time of year to catch them blooming in their pinkish-purple splendor.



Also fun were the taxis: yellow like the ones in New York...in the 1970s.


Colonial buildings of interest included the cathedral, which was closed so we couldn't go inside...


The congress, which is mostly a modern glass building now but encompasses a bit of the original building, kind of cool...


...and the presidential palace (now housing government offices), modeled on Versailles and built largely by child laborers while 9 out of 10 Paraguayan men were off getting killed in the Triple Alliance War in the 1800s.


Never heard of the Triple Alliance War? Yeah, neither had we. Apparently, it happened when a dictator of Paraguay crazily declared war on Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia all at once, and the three formed a triple alliance against Paraguay and kicked its butt. Inexplicably, this dictator appears to be nationally revered to this day, and he and his son (who built the elaborate palace) lie in the pantheon of heroes on the main square, guarded by uniformed soldiers.


We popped into the free national cultural museum, which might have been more interesting to you if you were Paraguayan, and where I distinguished myself by mistaking a uniformed schoolgirl for a museum employee and asking her where the bathroom was, much to her bewilderment as she did not know any better than I did.

And that was about it for touristic Asuncion. We had our afternoon free and decided to head to another part of town where the churrascarias and shopping malls were. True to form, even though the city bus cost about 30 cents, Andy made me walk the four miles to this other part of town.

We did stop into a really cool cemetary that was like a little town of mausoleums, but those pictures are moored on the other camera. We also dined at yet another churrascaria (all you can eat meat place), where the meat was fantastic and the price was a new low for us, about $11 US per person. Sweet. And we capped the night off by scoring tickets to the Orchestra Filharmonia de la Ciudad de Asuncion, where we heard a French-Brazilian composition and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique for a whopping $2 per ticket.

Despite the country's history of military coups and crazy dictators, the people are incredibly nice in Paraguay and appeared to be quite hardworking as well. They were out in force at 5AM when our bus came into the station, ready to sell us coffee, souvenirs, sunglasses, and anything else you could think of. The lady who sold me my 50-cent mate (see the forthcoming Foods of Paraguay post) sat with me and chatted, despite my poor Spanish, for 45 minutes while I drank cup after cup and Andy ran off to buy our next set of bus tickets. Our waiter at the churrascaria hurriedly replaced Andy's drink for free when he discovered it was alcoholic (why are the words for "milkshake" and "strong rum cocktail" so similar in Spanish?) and wrote out detailed bus information for us when we asked him for advice on how to get to the theater, and on and on.

But move on we must, so we shipped out the next day for Buenos Aires, where we are at the moment. Foods of Paraguay coming in my next post.

Financial Updates

Now that we are out of Brazil, we thought we'd post some financial information.

Brazil: With visas ($130 each), and including the time that we spent in the rainforest in Manaus, the average was $118 per day. The visas account for about $10 each day. The average would have been less had we travelled more slowly since buses are expensive in Brazil. However, the total amount spent would have been more. If you aren't stuck on seeing quite as much, it might be well worth it to take a couple flights. They aren't cheap, but are about the same as a couple of overnight bus trips.

Also, a tip on food in Brazil. Pay by weight restaurants are very common, but don't actually seem that cheap unless you just get a plate of meat. Many places also offer a plate of the day (prato feito) that is really cheap with rice, beans, salad, and whatever meat you select. They may also offer a single plate option for the buffet that is as much as you can get on the plate for a set price. These are both better than actually paying by weight. Also, if you turn down the side street or go one block from the main square, food is often half the price or less. The restaurants may not look as nice, but the food was nearly as good in our experience.

Paraguay: $158 per day, but this is rather unfair to Paraguay since we were only there for 1.5 days and had to pay $90 for the visas. The country is about half the price of Brazil and is small so transport is cheap. You could definitely live decently for $50 per day once there. Note that in an effort to completely discourage tourism, a mandatory fee of $5 exists anytime you take money from an ATM if it is a foreign card. $5 is about the same price as the average person in Paraguay makes in a day, I think (not kidding). So, you are better to take cash if you can. Foreign exchange places exist everywhere and seemed to take any major currency since every currency is more major than the Paraguay Gurani.

Foods of Paraguay! (and a few stragglers from Brazil)

First, a little catching up on foods from Brazil.

In Foz do Iguacu, our last city in Brazil and a border town with both Paraguay and Argentina, a whole new street food cropped up: pao de queijo, or cheese bread, at the insanely cheap price of 7 breads for 1 Real (50 cents US).

Very happy Tara with her bag of cheese breads, which were kind of like a cross between a cheese rock from Big Booty in NY (aka Colombian pan de yuca) and a popover.


Also, when we showed up for the night bus to Paraguay, we had about $3 US left in Brazilian currency, so Andy dashed across the street to a convenience store to spend it on random snacks. He came back with (l to r) knockoff peanut M&Ms (I had been craving the real ones bad, but they are expensive in Brazil), maracuja (passionfruit) ice cream, and Kuat, which is Coca Cola´s guarana soda, sold everywhere in Brazil.

The soda taste was kind of sweet and sour, and way too carbonated for me. Guarana is a rainforest fruit that is supposed to have naturally stimulating properties, kind of like acai...I don't know about that, though, since we both fell asleep as soon as we reclined our seats on the night bus.

OK, on to foods of Paraguay!

I had read in our guidebook about the many types of chipas, or cheese breads, in Paraguay, and after the tasty pao de queijo of Brazil I was eager to try one. So when we went out for breakfast in Asuncion, I ordered the chipa guazu, or cheese bread made with fresh corn.

Too bad it was not so much a bread as a gloopy, quiche-like substance. I despise quiche, and Andy had to laugh at the look on my face when they brought this out.


I did manage to force down about 3/4 of it, eating verrry slowly. The tutti frutti juice I ordered with it (kind of like a fruit salad smoothie) was fortunately much tastier.

Just in time to wash the taste of the chipa out of my mouth, we stumbled on a lady with a stand in the park selling tereré, which is the national beverage of Paraguay.


It is yerba mate tea served ice-cold with "digestive herbs," whatever those may be. Basically, you end up with a cup filled with green stuff floating in water...


...and you suck the liquid up through a filtered straw.


Then you refill, and refill, and refill from a giant pitcher of ice water. (Or, if you are Paraguayan, from your personal thermos of mate, which you carry around with you whereever you go. Seriously, we saw a stockist at a supermarket trying to fill the shelves with one hand and carry his enormous mate thermos with the other. Quite amusing.)

Note that mate accoutrement was for sale everywhere in Asuncion. I am sure that the kind of mate cup you use and thermos you carry says something important about you in many countries of South America...


I had told the lady that it was my first time trying mate, and she laughed and let us take pictures and tutored me through it, including grabbing my cup from me and sucking hard through my straw because I wasn't imbibing fast enough. (Ah, the hygiene observed in the shadow of all the H1N1 posters!). But I didn't want to be rude, so I just took it back from her and followed her lead until she was satisfied. Andy even tried some, but since it was strong and unsweetened he almost choked. Then he went off to buy our bus tickets and I chatted with the lady in my broken Spanish. Found out that she had 10 children; she asked why I didn't have any children yet, etc. while I drank my 18 more cups of mate.

Sufficiently caffeinated, I was ready for snacks. We found these at a shop; they were filled with guava jam and dusted with coconut, but mostly tasted like slightly stale butter cookies...not so great.


But we ate'em anyway. We've seen these since in Argentina, too.


Far better was this apple-raisin strudel Andy ordered in a pastry shop called Michael Bock. Not sure what makes this Paraguayan, but it was delicious!


What's this? A BAGEL??


Indeed, there seems to be a bagel-like bread product available in Paraguay and Argentina. It's eggy, chewy, and has caraway seeds in it. Possibly also has cheese in it, I can't really tell. In any case, I was quite happy when Andy bought me a bag of 5 of these at the Paraguay bus station for 50 cents US. (Once again, we were trying to spend the last of our local currency and ended up with some random fun snacks.)

That's all we've got for foods of Paraguay, but not bad for 33 hours, I think. We did buy a couple of cheap but disappointing filled churros on the street. Oh, and you'll never guess what we found at the supermarket in Asuncion...peanut butter! It was more expensive than in America, but far cheaper than the $7 jars of Skippy we saw in Sao Paulo. Plus, it was actually made in Paraguay. We tried it today, and it's very sweet. Maybe because the only two ingredients are peanuts and sugar. Anyway, we'll try to post a pic of the Paraguayan peanut butter with our next set of food pics.