I watched the game with some coworkers in their house out in Barrio Primero de Enero (1st of January). Lot’s of neighborhoods, towns, football teams, soccer stadiums, etc...are named for their founding date...again the creativity issue.
Anyway, when I walked into the house I saw an alligator skin handing from the wall. My friend from work, Oveshai (lamb) said he hunted and killed that. They say gator meat is great. I looked over to the table and there was a taxidermy armadillo. He said it killed that too. We walked over to the big ice-chest style fridge to store the beer, and he had to reposition the beer around a cow’s head and pieces of carpincho meat. I tried not to think about drinking from the lips of bottles that had been lying against raw cow and carpincho meat and told them I wanted to go hunting with them the next time they went.
For reference, this is a carpincho.
The game was pretty boring as we were already qualified and easily handled Venezuela 2-1. Nevertheless, it was still fun hanging out with some of my coworkers and seeing them in their natural environment. After the game we just sat around for a while talking about a future fishing trip they want to take me on. They told me it would cost us around 100,000 Gs ($25) for a day of fishing including gas, lots of food and drinks, and all supplies needed. We both know that isn’t much, but I tried convincing them that was really high and I didn’t know if I could afford it. I’m trying to combat the common perception that we must earn a lot of money since we chose to leave the States to come here.
Other topics included, let’s see what is pretty much the only topic Paraguayan males discuss with me?...oh yeah girls.
We threw my bike in the back of a truck and headed back towards town. When we arrived we were surprised to see a ton of people at the town plaza watching the motocross racers doing wheelies in the middle of the plaza. As we first drove up, I saw one of them suffer a nasty crash, and with that our attention was caught so we parked and joined the excitement. Music mixed with the loud revving dirtbike/moto engines to make for a pretty loud atmosphere. Smoke filled the air and people were everywhere. The next day’s racers were popping wheelies all over the place.
