April 3, 2010

I’m sitting on my bed in my little house and the strains of music coming from the church across the street reach my ears. It’s the last night of Pascua Joven and I opted out of it. Apparently, youth is up to age 26 so it doesn’t really work when I try to pass 23 as an adult. The past few nights the activities have ended at midnight, but tonight is an alnighter.
I just finished catching up on J. Wo’s blog about U of I’s women’s ultimate team, Menace. It was incredibly entertaining, even if getting to San Diego was a disaster and the actual tournament didn’t leave my team well ranked. Ultimate is so much more than the end numbers and I am so glad they had a great time. I can’t believe J. Wo forgot her cleats in the car! I don’t feel so bad anymore, but at the time it was terribly humiliating. I think the worst part was that I also forgot my shorts, but of course I didn’t notice that I was also missing my cleats until after I had found a solution for my shorts. How embarrassing.
My first American visitor just left this morning. Anne visited me. She extended her service an extra year and I am basically her follow-up although I’m in a site she recommended which is a few K from her site. I had so much fun playing hostess and I was so happy to find a fellow soy lover. We made sloppy joe’s (I might have gone a little heavy on the worcestershire sauce) and baked sweet potatoes and for dessert that night I made bread pudding with a cinnamon vanilla hard cream sauce and fresh fruit. We spent the better part of the afternoon paddling around in a little row boat out on Rio Monday (mun-dow-oo). It was hilarious trying not to look like idiots. “Yes, I know how to row a boat,” I say, but this is always dangerous because it usually involves being watched by everyone and of course being no expert I don’t immediately smoothly pull out to the middle of the river. I get the hang of it eventually and at one point we realize just how afraid Paraguayans are of deep water. Anne and I were not entirely sure who was in trouble, but once things calmed down and the kids were out of the deep water Noelia’s face was pale white. I wish it was possible to teach swimming lessons.
Well, I’ll let the pictures show you the rest of this past week. Unforntately, I don’t have a picture from my banana peel war with Favie, but I’m sure you’re not surprised at me. We finally called a truce once the peels were beyond disgusting. Favie pulled out a glob of peels from his pocket. All this happened with the grandmother not minding in the least.