Vacation Re-cap
This was written by a friend of mine who went on my vacation with me, She wrote about our experience, and seeing as how she had already written in all up and everything, I am just republishing in my blog....ahh, vacation. Even volunteers need vacation every once in awhile. As a peace corps volunteer I acrew 2 vacation days a month. That´s 24 days a year you are thinking, "that is more than i get and I have a real job" But it´s not as many as it sounds. We don´t get weekends as peace corps volunteers, we can´t leave our communities even on sat and sun, and often times most of our work is on the weekends since that´s when people can meet. (doesn´t mean we don´t sneak a few days here and there to save our sanity) Well other than my few days here and there in Asuncion, the capital and visits to other volunteer´s sites my sanity was telling me that I could really use a "real" vacation. So, I counted up my vacation days and decided to take 13 days to leave the country. I filled out my vacation request form, submitted it to Peace Corps, dusted off my South American travel book, got 3 other volunteers on board and started planning "Big Mama goes to the Beach" (The name we gave our vacation. Loren and Rosana-both urban youth volunteers that arrived the same time I did and my gf, Sarah a beekeeping volunteer who lives close to me decided to go to Buenos Aires (BA for short) and Uruguay.
We took an 18 hour bus ride from Asuncion to BA. We were more excited than 4 little girls on their way to Disneyland. We made a rule that we were not allowed to talk about anything related to our Paraguayan Peace Corps lives. We weren´t allowed to discuss sad situations we were dealing with or complain about work stuff. It didn´t take but a couple hours to realize we didn´t have a whole lot to talk about with that rule. Our lives before Peace Corps kind of seem so distant now that it´s hard to keep a conversation going involving things only from more than a year ago or only talking about the future. So we accepted who we are now, people who talk about Paraguay and changed the rule to only being able to talk about happy things about our service.
We arrived in Buenos Aires and immediately recognized why Argentina is a developed country and Paraguay is not. We rode nice, clean buses that had handicap access and didn´t break down all the time. Every street was paved, i had forgotten what that looked like! We were so content to eat in restaurants and shop in cute stores, see book stores and book stands everywhere because people actually read and could see all the culture and museums and parks and people with healthy, fat dogs being walked on leashes! Then somebody said "hey you guys...it´s been 2 hours we´ve been walking around I am not sweating and my feet are still clean" For about 2 hours all we did was talk about these differences and then we were adjusted and started to forget what it was like in Paraguay....we were in vacation mode.
We stayed 2 days and 2 nights in BA and did a whirlwind tour of the city. We saw tango shows in the streets, drank wine and ate cheese in the parks, visited the famous Recoletta cemetary and saw Evita´s tomb, went to ourdoor markets, saw the famous plazas and congress buildings and enjoyed good food. Buenos Aires is known to be the "Paris of South America" and it really is. I enjoyed it more than i enjoyed Madrid, Spain.
On day 3 we took a ferry from BA to Uruguay. This trip only takes an hour if you are on a fast boat but our ferry was more of a mini cruise, complete with cafeteria, bar, and a Latin dance show. We enjoyed this very much and became very excited about being on the water and so close to our beach part of the vacation. When we arrived in Uruguay, we spent a few hours tootling around the quaint town of Colonia which is kind of known for being a cute, little town Argentinian couples for for a weekend gettaway. Then we took a bus to the capital, Montevideo. We spent 2 days in Montevideo, walking around the city, sitting at the rocky coastline, and once again eating good food. Our favorite was the mozzarella pizza in Uruguay because it was much more like real pizza than the Pizza in Paraguay.
On day 5 we traveled by bus to Punta del Este, the most famous tourist spot in Uruguay and becoming one of the most famous tourist spots in South America. Many Hollywood movie stars have homes there and now i know why. It is a small penninsula filled with designer stores, expensive restaurants, nice beaches and a nightlife that has a great reputation. This isn´t excatly my scene but we wanted to at least see what this place was all about. Everything was out of our price range and when Sarah didn´t even get served right away at the McDonald´s because she was undressed we realized we weren´t in our kind of place. I had heard the surf was supposed to be really good and even that didn´t seem to be as great as i hoped. There was a lot of onshore winds and whitecaps so the surf was blown out. I rented a board anyway and they gave me a free wetsuit to use. I thought "hey great, a free wetsuit" but when i put it on i realized why it was free. THe entire back part of it was torn open, exposing most of my back. I decided it was still better than nothing and wore it anyway in front of some of the richest people on the continent. I surfed for a few hours then laid on the beach for another 9 hours. even though my friends were telling me i should not stay out so long i couldn´t help it. this was what i missed most and what relaxed me the most....laying on sand, hearing the waves, feeling the ocean breeze. What i wasn´t thinking about was the effect of the sun. "I´m Paraguayan now, i get worse exposure in Paraguay, i can take this" I was wrong. On the first day in Punta del Este I got a bad case of sun poisening.
I had sun poisening once before, when i was in France. That time it lasted only a day or so. Apparently the 2nd time you get it, it´s a lot worse. I was in bed for 4 days after that with a 102 fever, vomiting,chills, exhaustion, diahrehea, and of course a lot of sun blisters. Stupid me. The good news is that I didn´t really miss much, i saw Punta del Este on my first day and didn´t miss hanging out with the rich kids in our hostel, hearing about how they had been traveling around the world for the past 4 months on mom and dad´s money or how they graduated college 3 months ago and looking for a job was such hard work that they´re parents agreed they "needed a break." (these are real stories that my friends got to hear) But when people asked what we they were doing, they enjoyed saying "we´ve been living in Paraguay doing development work for the past year" My friends spent more time on the beach and took good care of me. They say it´s good to travel with someone you´re dating to see if you can stand each other, and we discovered we could stand each other and I realized what a great nurse she is and that she doesn´t even get grossed out hearing me talk about my diahrehea nonstop and doesn´t mind me vomiting in her presence. :) I fully recovered and they said i looked better than all of them with my new tan and my amazing stomach after loosing 10 pounds and my crash diet. Rosana our mexican american friend kept saying "i want sun poisening so i can loose weight but i won´t get it, i´ll just turn black"
On day 8 we left the ritzy life of Punta for a more relaxing, mellow, normal person beach town called La Paloma in Costa Azul. We rented a beach house for 3 nights and immediately decided we should have rented it for a week instead because it was perfect. There were two rooms, a kitchen to cook in, a nice living room area with cable TV, a yard with equipment to barbeque and it was one block from the beach. I felt well enought to play in the water some more before we left but the surf was still bad.
ON day 11 we traveled back to Buenos Aires on a fast boat that only took an hour, but there were no Latin dancers. WE stayed two more nights in Buenos Aires before taking a 22 hour bus ride back to Paraguay on day 13. It should have been 18 hours but we spent 4 hours at the border waiting to cross. The waiting gave us a good opportunity to get back into the habit of the slow pace of life in Paraguay.
Uruguay was more similar to Paraguay than Argentina but it was still much more developed. Before vacation Paraguay seemed to me to be very isolated and after this vacation i have realized how isolated it is. There are no natural resources here I am sure that has a lot to do with it´s lagging behind. The countrysides of Urguay and Argentina are still very vast and open but the land just seemed richer. The crops looked better, there were plantations of trees and evidence of real farm equipment like tractors and irrigation systems. Roads were better, there were street signs, there was not nearly as much poverty. As depressing as it was to see all of this and realize how bad off Paraguay really is, it was refreshing to see that Paraguay´s neighbors are doing better and that hopefully this is influencing them in a positive way. Paraguay has been through a lot and had a rough history, development is slow and i have faith one day it won´t be so isolated. And maybe one day a traveler will want to take a bus to Paraguay from Buenos Aires to see what an interesting place it is.
I am happy to be back in site, and I do feel refreshed and re-motivated for another year of service.Paraguayans have a much different culture and blunt way of saying things so people keep telling me how skinny i am now (actually I just weigh what i used to weigh before eating all their fatty fried food) and my host mom even went so far as to say i looked like i was pregnant before so i must have had my baby and left it in Uruguay! Haha, that´s a compliment and i´ve been here long enough to recognize it as one! I have only put a dent in my vacation days and although i´m glad to be where I am I already can´t wait to plan my next vacation. This week marks excatly one year in country for me. I arrived on Feb 8th of last year. This doesn´t mean i am excatly half way done though. Our 3 months of training doesn´t count in our 2 years of service so I will actually be halfway through service at the end of April. Then the 12 month countdown will begin and I am told it goes fast!
Although I used my vacation time to travel in South America instead of flying home, i do feel a little more connected with the 1st world again. The American girls we met in hostels gave us updates on what celebrity broke up with who and informed us Heath Leger died, what kind of Ipod is out now, what movies are playing, etc. It was entertaining and fun to get our heads out of the 3rd world for awhile. I find myself enjoying that kind of news more than i ever have in my life. It keeps me balanced i think. So keep me updated on what´s going on in the 2008 elections, who is turning up dead and being found by the maid, what diet is popular and keep reading my blog to hear about my next adventure or day to day life!
Jajotopata! (we shall find each other)
