New Cyber Cafe in Guarambare

I just left mass in Guarambare to smell popcorn and seeing couples getting cuddly in the plaza. One motorcycle nearly ran me over. Pedestrians have absolutely no rights here. I just have to hope that they won´t come up on the sidewalk.

Last night I went to a bar with my host sister and her boyfriend. The bar only places English classic tunes like Air Supply, Aerosmith, the GoGos... you get the idea. It´s a pretty cheesy place and one of the only sit down restaurants that I know of in this town. I would know more but I feel like my host mom is pretty protective. For example, today I wanted to go to a soccer game in town but my host mom said it´s dangerous b-c people throw rocks. I don´t even know who to cheer for, so I don´t know why ppl would throw rocks at me. However the fact that there are police at the games shows that things do happen sometimes. People are so nuts about futbol here that there was a semi size truck full of about 50 ppl waving their team flag; yelling, screaming, cheering and the driver honking his horns in rhythm.

For the first time ever I washed my clothes by hand and I would rather never do it again. It doesn´t seem to really get clothes clean and is much too labor intensive when I know that there is a washing machine right in my kitchen. My madre washes my bigger clothes in the machine but insists that she has a lot to teach me about living such as washing my clothes b-c "a lot of ppl don´t have washing machines", she says. My nerves were getting short today b-c my Guarani is malo (bad). Therefore I can´t talk to my abuelos (grandparents) next door and my host padre says he won´t talk to me anymore in castellano (what they call Spanish here). Lucky for me he´s gone most of the week in the Chaco working in estancias.

This week I get to go to Asunción, finally! I wish I had time to shop in the mall at Mariscal López, but in keeping with the training theme, Peace Corps controls most of your days. Wed. morning myself and another trainee will be sent on an assignment to find something in Asunción and then in the afternoon we get a tour of the Peace Corps office. The PC director, among others, works there. The director is Michael Eschelmann and is actually from Athens, Ohio! I may have already mentioned that...

I miss the freedom of being able to arrive home whenever I want and not having people tell me what to do. My wings are definitely clipped a bit living with a host family, but all the same I wouldn´t be integrating as well. There are definitely strange things happening everyday, like a random cow on my street that my little sister had the desire to throw rocks at, the poor cow; the lack of any organized water runoff system, therefore there is water standing in people´s yards and flowing in creeks that flow to who knows where; and the piles of trash you find in meadows blocks from the main plaza and city govt. building in town.

I´m eating so much meat here that I think I´ll tell my host family in my placement that I´m a vegetarian!