"you know," said the cynical plasticman, "you speak english pretty good for an english person."

They say that, in poker, if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, you're it. Fortunately, should you try to obtain work documents here in Paraguay, you'll be well aware from the start that you're being taken for a dance. I had a meeting with a lawyer today about getting my work documents here and she didn't paint a pretty picture. The government here wants everything in duplicate, translated, notarised, authorised, lost, found, sent to Somalia and buried in peat for thirty years before it'll even consider looking at your work application. It's a damn sight cheaper & easier to get a work visa for somewhere like Australia, that's for sure, and the pay's better there, too.

Anyway, enough with the bitching. I'm just cranky because I've been drinking too much coke and the acid & caffeine are making me cranky. The last week or so, I've been busy during the day sorting out work and also looking for cheaper places to stay, and in the evening I've been with A. There is a lot of talk of potential jobs in the pipeline for me - English teacher, private tutor and something else which I can't really talk about, but which involved writing a CV that drew inspiration less from my university Human Resource Development lectures and more from Mrs. Wilson's creative writing classes in Grade 5. If I get away with the whoppers I told in that one, I'll probably have used up the last of my nine lives... Anyway, we'll see what happens. At the mo, I'm kinda in limbo.

So, I was up last night until about 3 in the morning with A, translating my resumé into Spanish. At the end, I felt a surge of pride - I've never translated my CV before and it looked pretty good. Even if I do say so myself. I get the feeling that A's got a better command of Spanish than I do of English - I mean, she like reads books and shit, and like the really boring ones, too. She was patient enough to put up with my neurotic querying of her every suggestion and I managed to get through three hours of being told without getting into a huff and breaking something.

The problem I'm finding at the moment, though, is that I'm getting totally accustomed to life in this city, to the extent that it's difficult to maintain a really fresh European perspective on things. I catch the bus now and I'm absolutely fine with the fact that the bus is still moving when I hop on and hop off, that the bus drivers are amongst the most anti-social bastards on the planet and that a constant stream of vendors will be passing through the bus during the journey, flogging everything from chewing gum to religious devotional cards. The hazards of walking on pavements that were designed to weed out the slow, the weak and the stupid are something that I barely even register now - casually sidestepping enormous potholes, ducking to avoid being scalped by rusting street signs and veering around jagged spikes protruding from unfinished buildings are just some of the things that make my morning breakfast run just a bit more erratic than in England, but which I'm pretty much used to now.

My morning breakfast run is worth mentioning at this point. I get up at around 8 or 9 in the morning, either at the pensión or at A's place, have a cup of coffee and then head out in search of chipas, which I get from any one of countless vendors lining Estigarribia off the east end of Plaza de los Heroes. After that, I head down to Plaza de la Independencia, which overlooks the river, and sit in the sunshine munching on my chipas whilst I plan my day and read the paper. The plaza itself isn't much to look at, but the view of the river is gorgeous - a massive, twisting slick stretching out wide across the plains below the city, sparsely littered with the boats of both the poor and the rich. With the sun blazing down, glinting off the water, and the Chaco hazy in the distance... Fantastic.

In front of the plaza are some of the city's slums, which are probably going to get bulldozed at some point in the next couple of years. It's a collection of shanty houses that are made of any and all materials, with a strong smell of humanity - dirt, shit & smoke - drifting off it when the wind changes direction. Constantly circling above the slums are octagonal kites flown by the children, made out of sticks and plastic sheets, generally being flown until they join the ranks of other, dear departed kites that drifted too close to the telephone lines. The kids are all pretty undernourished, probably due to poverty and also probably due to deficiencies in the typical Paraguayan diet, which is kinda scanty on the vegetable side of things.



Regarding the papers and the news here, I have to say that I'm feeling pretty cut off from the developed world. International news doesn't really get too much exposure in the periodicals here and the local news is more concerned with domestic affairs & what those bastards in Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil have been up to. (There's not much love lost between Paraguay and its neighbours, as they all nicked land from it a hundred or so years ago in the War of the Triple Alliance, and they still have their beady eyes on its river.) There are a few of highbrow papers, which are politics-heavy, and the local equivalent of the tabloids are less smutty than in England, but with much more gore. Last week, the front page of one of the tabloids was a picture of a guy who had shot himself in the head with a shotgun and, inside the papers, it's pretty much the same stuff - people who got stabbed, people who got shot, people who got into fights. Got a picture? Bosh. Stick it in. The more blood, the better.

The TV news is sorta the same, but I'm generalising here because I've not watched enough of it to distinguish between the editorial styles of the various channels. One thing that can be said, though, is the criminal suspects are given bugger all privacy, regardless of age - kids that got caught nicking car stereos can and will enjoy the privilege of having the Paraguayan media descend on them in the police station as they try to hide their faces under their jackets. And the media coverage doesn't skimp on the gore, either - a family got slaughtered in their house in a suburb of Asunción the other day and the country, as it tucked into the Paraguayan equivalent of cornflakes in the morning, was treated to images of the pools of blood and sheet-covered corpses... No wonder they're all fucking paranoid - the family that runs the pensión where I'm staying hardly ever goes out and they're totally convinced that any time that they do step outside their fortified compound, every malvado in Asunción is going to descend on them.

Before moving off the topic of claret & rubble, I should just like to mention that Paraguay is one of the world's largest producers of marijuana (if not the largest), and so I do find it kinda amusing that the main newspaper here is called La Crónica...

And I seem to have reached the point where I'm sick of writing.

Paul out.