Thursday, July 31, 2008

Day Dos in the Dos - 7.15.08




Tavapy 2, 7.14.08 - Today was another fun-filled day. I woke up, peed in the latrine, brushed my teeth by the water pump, and then took a nice hot shower. I got dressed, drank mate (remember, MAH-tay), then my host family gave me some sugary-ass, hot milky stuff that I found out was soy milk. Not a fan. A rack of bread for breakfast; I ate one sweetbread and then took the rest to go.

Our "language class" was super chill; we talked a bit about abonos verdes (planting trees whose leaves automaticall replenish the soil) then chopped it up about random stuff, then Pooja's senora brought everyone pireka (think: West Indian bakes) for breakfast. Yum. We then went on a search for a hierbal (hierba orchard) and basically went on a fantastic voyages through two through about 20 hectares of farmland. On the way we may as well have been bushwacking at times; it was a good thing that I had on my heavy duty hiking boots. And then Pooja stepped on a fire ant hill and she had Tim (who had on flip-flops, poor guy) were semi-attacked. We gave up and decided to head back to my host family's house for lunch, and then of course when we were back on the path we ran up on two of the guys harvesting hierba leaves from the trees. We arrived at Feliciano's and immediately gulped down some terere (remember, like mate only cold) and then ate lunch. It occurred to me that I told them how I love tallarines (pasta, pronounced tie-yuh-REE-nes) with beef and that's exactly what we had. We hung out a bit after lunch and then headed back to Andrew's crib for siesta. There is absolutely no stress down here, it's amazing. Who knew life could be so simple.

After siesta we were supposed to translpant some lettuce from the seedbed to the garden, but Dres had to go take care of some coop stuff so we laid around and hung out. Earlier in the day I successfully extracted a pique from Pooja's foot, and she had another one in her other foot but for some reason it refused to allow itself to be extracted. Recalitrant little bastard. So anyway, I broke out my Swiss Army knife and decided to saw a bamboo branch and then Timo was playing baseball with it. After awhile Timo left with his host and Pooj, Dres and I hung out until about 8:30. We dropped Pooj off then Dres and I came back to my host family's, ate dinner and chopped it up with Feliciano. He gave me a huge compliment when he asked Dres, "how does she speak so much Guarani???". I thought to myself, mmmmyes the illustrious plan unfolds...

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