Christmas 2008

So, after over a week of 100+ degree weather I was thinking it might be a little hard to summon any ¨Christmas Spirit¨. Well, thanks to some rain that broke the heat last night and a quick trip to the Onion´s Cheap Toy Roundup (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/cheap_toy_roundup_2008) I´m feeling a lot more festive. I´m in San Jose right now to pick up a fellow volunteer who´s going to spend Christmas with me and buy tons of fruit to make ¨clerico¨ aka really good whop that is the traditional Christmas drink. We´ll stay up until midnight tonight and celebrate Christ´s birth at the earliest possible hour in this time zone. Tomorrow, since we´re both vegetarians, we´ll avoid the Paraguayan tradition of eating tons of meat (something I´m not quite as down with as the alcoholic fruit salad). Merry Christmas to all!

Trindidad

Día de Acción de Gracias

I recently went to a hotel in southern Paraguay (near Encarnacion) to celebrate Thanksgiving with over a hundred other Peace Corps volunteers. We stayed at the beautiful Hotel Tirol, a German run establishment nestled in forested hills, where we swam, ate, and talked English. The hotel is located only a few miles from the Jesuit ruin site Trinidad and I took the opportunity to check out the site with a group of friends one morning. If you haven´t yet seen the movie The Mission check it out and watch it. In the early 1700s the Jesuits organized the Guaraní people to build large reductions where they had shelter, were educated in Catholocism and were protected from the rampant slave traders. The use of native labor under a concentrated leadership actually proved to be an economically successful model that allowed 4000 people to live at the site called Trinidad. Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767 and the reductions have since been deteriorating into their current state. Trindidad is actually a UNESCO World Heratige site; the grounds were remarkably well kept and we hired a very knowledgable guide to tell us about the site.