It´s German for ¨Boredom¨

As slow as Asuncion is on a weekday, it simply becomes catatonic on the weekends, without even the perfunctory openings in the morning to keep up appearances. I wandered through downtown, figuring I could fit in all the government buildings into an afternoon. It was a Sunday constitutional through Constitution Plaza, so to speak.

None of the major buildings had much to get excited about, other than the novelty of a presidential mansion without a fence; ¨Dubya, hey, I was just walking by...¨ The Congress building is a hideous mass of gleaming steel and glass, buffed brick, and cantilevered overhangs; that is, the type of ugly that could have only been designed through a competition and by an architect. Across the street, at the edge of the bluff that falls away to the Parana, is a small plaza, once probably quite grand, but now in a poor state. Marking the boundary of the plaza is a chipping white Italianate edge rail, and I paused in the afternoon heat to take a few touristy pictures of the fading glory. As I looked down at my camera - I still don´t really know how to use it - I saw something trot out of the bushes, and nuzzle a tree. The animal came over to me - it was a fat black pig, snorting with delight over a nut it had found.

I suddenly smelled smoke, thick oily smoke, and heard children yelling. It occurred to me to lean over the rail and I did - right into the face of some of the worst slums I´ve seen since leaving Lima. There is no transition between Congress and the shantytowns, just a bluff, over which the pavement ends.

Asuncion was dead, but I had hurried back to my hostel - I had an appointment for dinner with two German girls, Jennifer and Mareike, the only other tourists I met in Paraguay. It´s a strange thing, really, that I have met very few foreigners my age in South America, because everyone (including the German girls) seems to be either 19 or 27. Makes me wonder what I´m doing here, or what everyone else is doing differently.

Anyway, the German girls were unimpeachably German, holding their cigarettes with their index and middle fingers pointed directly up, rotating their wrists back and forth with each drag. They spoke in English to me, German to each other, and Spanish when necessary. They both had nervous laughs - suffice to say, they were wonderful.

Well, they left the next day on the Death Bus to Bolivia, and I headed north up the Rio Paraguay to the town of Concepcion. Auf Wiedersehen!