So it’s been a long time, huh?  Things got pretty busy right after we got back from the rural homestay in Rosario. During the couple weeks we had after we got back, we had a midterm, a paper to write summarizing the rural homestay, and a preliminary proposal for the independent project.

Anyway, by Easter weekend, I was ready to relax.  That Friday and Saturday, I headed out with Martha and a bunch of her Butler program friends to a suburb of BA to a house that one of them was house sitting for family friends who are diplomats in Argentina.  Seven of us went and spent the entire weekend cooking and relaxing.  We had barbecue, pizza, stir fry, tons of snacks, home made sangria loaded with fruit, and spent a lot of time out in the sun at the pool.  It was a good way to start off the weekend.

Saturday afternoon, I spent packing and Easter Sunday in the early afternoon, I hopped on a bus from BA to Porto Alegre, Brazil.  20 hours later, we arrived.  We only had just enough time to move everything into our rooms in the hotel, grab a quick breakfast and take fast showers before we were busy again — Portuguese lessons!  A couple hours later, we hopped back on the bus for a drive through the south end of Porto Alegre to Ipanema (I asked, sadly it’s not THE Ipanema where the girl in the song is from — that Ipanema is in Rio) through a hilly area along a huge river/ lake.  It was beautiful!  Lunch completely caught us off guard.  We were told we were eating at cantina that sells locally produced meat.  We ate some little things that looked and kind of tasted like fish sticks as appetizers, but only after we finished did they explain what they were — Alligator!  They served ostrich steaks, slices of sauteed capybara, and little fried alligator nuggets too along with Brazil’s national soda, Guarana.  That afternoon, we visited a local organic farm.  The project we visited really reminded me a lot of the agrotourism stuff I worked on in Peru.  We spent the rest of the week taking tons of classes with various teachers in the local university, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.  Unfortunately, most of the classes were extremely boring, living up to SIT’s standard of long powerpoints and professors who speak in monotone.  On top of that, they’d have thick Portuguese accents and some would mix english, spanish, and Portuguese making it very taxing to keep your focus.  In all, I think I did learn a lot about the country and the visits we did and the free time we had in the city definitely made up for the boringness of classes.

In addition to the organic farm, we also visited the Landless Workers Movement, an immense, popular social movement demanding land reform in Brazil where less than 2% of landowners control nearly half of the country’s land.  The first group we visited was living in a very precarious encampment on a piece of unused land that they had occupied for the past several years.  Their houses were made of plastic and many couldn’t find work, but even so, they continued the legal battle for government recognition of their use of that land and funding to build proper homes.  There they ran their own school (outside where the chalkboard was the black plastic wall of a house), had their own pharmacy (filled with natural remedies), and even had a communications house with phones and a library filled with books.  That afternoon, we also visited a similar community that had succeeded in taking legal control of a piece of land and now lived in a beautiful community which was built using government grants.  They had enough land to have a dairy, pig farm, and to grow rice to sell on the market as well as electricity, running water, and an adequate school.

Porto Alegre as a city wasn’t actually all that interesting.  I feel like Brazil has much more to offer in terms of places to visit, but I guess maybe most other cities don’t have good universities for us to study in.  It seemed like we could visit everything the city had to offer in one afternoon.  The town was situated in a hilly area on the shore of where a river went into a lake which eventually empties into the Atlantic.  It was great to actually be able to get to the water and to be in a hilly area.  Buenos Aires couldn’t be flatter and the water is separated from the rest of the city by gross industrial areas or inaccessible through private lands.  Porto Alegre had several beautiful plazas, a large central marked (something you also can’t find in BA), and an enormous cathedral.  What I enjoyed most about the town was the food — it was so much more diverse than in BA!  Most cheap places you could go were called Buffet Livres (all you can eat) or you pay a by-the-kilo rate.  They had amazingly delicious black beans and rice, tons of kinds of meat, and every kind of veggie cooked in more ways than you can imagine.  Best of all, there was dirt cheap tropical fruit everywhere.  Pineapple juice was always fresh made — you’d hear the blender go on in the kitchen whenever you ordered it.  Aside from food, I really did enjoy Portuguese though it confused me a lot.  It sound fairly similar to someone speaking Spanish with a heavy french accent, I think.  I could often understand if someone would talk slowly and I picked up a lot of words.  Written though, a lot is spelled the same as Spanish, but pronounced completely differently.  Speaking, what sounds like it would be spelled the same is actually spelled very differently.  Portuguese is the least phonetic language I’ve ever encountered.  For instance, in Spanish, “song” is “canción” and it’s said just as it’s spelled — with a soft “c”.  But in Portuguese, it’s said almost the exact same way but spelled “canção”.  And that’s only the beginning.  I got the important things!  Sim, não, tudo bem, bom dia, bom noite, obrigado, uma cerveja por favor, onde está o banheiro?

Anyway, Friday evening we hopped on another bus to Iguazu Falls, a solid 16 hour drive to the north.  When we got there the next morning and rolled out of the bus all red eyed, we were completely surprised by the climate — the few hours north made a HUGE difference.  It was completely tropical!  Hot, humid, lime and papaya trees growing at the hotel and there were parakeets flying around.  We had a couple hours to relax and move in before we got on a bus to cross back to the Argentine side for the national park there.

Let me tell you: Iguazu Falls is unbelievable.  It puts Niagara to shame.  First of all, it’s taller, second of all instead of having two or three falls, it has TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE.  It’s not in the middle of a big city, there’s fewer people (we may have lucked out!), and you can see wildlife.  You’ll have to see pictures to get it, but I don’t think they will even begin to convey how amazing Iguazu is.  The main part is called La Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat) and you can walk across the river over catwalks until you’re right up above it, looking down with the mist blasting back up at you.  After that, you can walk along a catwalk on the Argentine side along the river up to the bottoms of many of the smaller ones and again across the top of them.  There’s bright butterflies and tropical birds everywhere.  Around sunset as the park began to clear out, we stayed behind some and even got to see a few toucans!  Also, along a lot of the trails, there’s tons of coatis — raccoon like creatures that are reddish brown to black with long striped tails and pointy noses… check them out… plus some kind of ratlike/ guinepiglike creature.

Sunday, we split in two groups — one flew back to BA and headed on Monday to Uruguay and we took the bus across the border to Paraguay.  Sunday afternoon, we arrived in Asuncion to a completely deserted city.  Apparently everything shuts down on Sundays — it was so quiet in a city of over a million people!  We checked into our hotel which seems to be perpetually stuck in the late 50s or early 60s.  Every piece of furnitue, light fixture, the bathroom, everything, seems like it should be put into a museum dedicated to those decades.  When we went to the bar/ cafe, there was quiet jazz playing and a waiter sat in the corner in a shaft of light shing through dust motes as if he’d been waiting since 1962.  He got up (we almost thought he’d be brushing the past 50 years of dust off his shoulder) and offered us fine Cuban cigars (which we declined) and said that he’d be waiting if we wanted to come back.  That was our first lesson about economics Paraguay.  You might say “What?  Wait a minute — what kind of hotel are you staying in where they offer you fine Cuban cigars?”  Well, it’s no classy establisment — $50 a night for double rooms.  Expensive by Paraguay standards, but still no high class place.  Paraguay just has almost no import taxes!  Everything is cheap here — Cuban cigars, imported liquor, cars, electronics — people from all the surrounding countries flock to Paraguay to buy goods here because they’re so much cheaper.

Later, we went out and wandered a bit looking for somewhere open to buy bottled water and finally found a gas station and as we were leaving, the strangest thing happened.  It seemed to get darker and a hot, dry wind started blasting through the streets.  We thought it seemed weird, but maybe it was something normal for the city, but then when trash started blowing around the streets and dust started whipping around, we noticed that the few people who had been out were running inside.  Before we knew it there was a sort of twilight cast to the whole city as a cloud of thick smoke blew into the city covering the sun and obscuring the tops of tall buildings.  We headed back to the hotel and asked what was going on and it turns out that this had happened a few times lately due to huge forest and grass fires a couple hundred kilometers to the south of the city.  The man at the reception warned us that it might rain and if it did, it would be a “lluvia negra” or a black rain — creepy right?  He said the ashes would turn it that way and that if it happened, we had to stay in because it was acidic.

Anyway, Asuncion got much better after Sunday.  Monday people were out in the street, the smoke blew  out by midday, and we took some legitimately interesting classes with great professors in the Catholic university here.  I think I actually really like the city.  The people are very friendly, the accent of the Spanish is beautiful, and life doesn’t seem too rushed like it sometimes does in Buenos Aires.  We’ve had four classes so far — a general introduction to the country, Paraguay’s economics, political history, and social movements today.  We also had a visit this morning to a women’s social support group that has founded a fair trade alliance for artisans, a mental and physical health center and a school in a small town on the outskirts of Asuncion.  Tomorrow we have a class on the Indigenous Paraguay and a visit to an indigenous town called Toba Qom.  Thursday we visit a couple museums and a huge market before hopping back on a bus to go to BA.

That’s about it for now!  Sorry it’s been so long… I’m still hoping to get pictures up before too long.  Internet has been a little slow and I have many hundreds to sort through… I’m working on it though.