latam [541b7baf]

We’ll have to start with the capital city: Asunción. Asuncion was founded on the Rio Paraguay, and has had it’s fair share of insane dictators, missionaries, “democratic” dictators, and so on. Currently the political situation is relatively stable, but Asuncion is a small city, with only around 400k people. Most of the wealthy areas are also concentrated in the suburbs.

Asuncion is really interesting though, because of the strangers that pass through. I met Syrian Christians from Damascus, a Kurd from Erbil who waited 6 years for a Paraguayan visa for a Paraguayan woman, a Salafi wordpress guy that loves doing Dawa and has ADHD, a Lebanese-Paraguayan who moved back from Lebanon following the recent war, a stateless formerly American man who renounced his US passport, and tons of coin people. All of these were drawn by some combination of low taxes (10% income tax) and easy residency (temporary residency after 2 months, permanent after 2 years). My Paraguayan friends repeatedly encouraged me to get a Paraguayan residency, telling me that it’d be useful if I ever wanted to drop off the face of the earth.

• write more about infrastructure decay

Asuncionos also have suprisingly diverse food tastes: Peruvian, Japanese, Korean, and Arab food were all readily available. For Paraguayans, since the most common form of East Asian are the Koreans, they end up calling any East Asian person a “Koreo”.

Asuncion the city is about average for your South American city. It’s small, but very green, with trees dotting the landscape everywhere, sometimes in the middle of the street! There’s a very visible police presence too, and the city feels quite safe at night, with upscale malls and street food all crammed next to each other. There’s also ruins of a previously much greater infrastructure, the railway museum hosts remants of a great railway that passed through all the major cities of Paraguay, but now lies defunct.

There’s a much larger concentration of Taiwanese and Lebanese in Ciudad del Este though.

Ciudad del Este is really the weirdest fucking place I’ve ever been. Nestled across the river from Foz de Iguacu, CDE sits on the triple frontier of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Like the last helicopter out of Saigon, CDE is crammed with every type of person imaginable. From instagrammable bars to stalls cramming the streets, everyone and anyone is in CDE.

• connect this metaphor better?

• talk more about imf below

CDE is primarily a shopping center. A brainchild of the IMF, who once suggested to the old Paraguayan dictator that he allow a city with low import taxes to get into the lucrative business of “reimportation” into Brazil and Argentina, CDE has blossomed into one of the biggest special economic zones in the world. Primarily electronics, but whiskey, clothes, and whatever the hell else you want can be found here. I saw a Brazilian driving back into Brazil with 20 iPads in his car, and him telling the border guard that they were all for “personal use” and therefore exempt from taxes.

CDE also has a reputation for high crime, with the American government putting out strange screeds once in a while suggesting that Hezbollah has an outpost there. The city is definitely sketchy, many roads are poorly lit, it’s quite dirty in some places, but I certainly didn’t see anything that obviously suggested of crime. I’m sure some amount of it certainly happens though.

There is a massive Lebanese presence in CDE, similar to how there’s tons of Lebanese in Foz. The origins of this I’m not too sure about, but many Paraguayans I talked to recounted how in CDE, you have to learn Portuguese, since most of the radio and TV content comes from Brazil.

• talk more about overall origins in latam

The city’s main shopping area, Centro, is right across the river from Foz. This place is always packed, and residents in CDE or Foz can cross for 24 hours visa free, which usually means that buses on either side won’t actually stop at the border. There’s constant, never ending traffic, smugglers of all kinds on both sides are repeatedly crossing the border.

• integrate this better
• bars and casinos
• extremely good chinese food
• greenery is interesting, not much
• mix of churches
• large portoin of money washing
• many lebanese have a dual passport saying they were born in foz and other was born in lebanon

While Spanish and Guaraní share official language status in Paraguay, in Asuncion the working language is Spanish. However, sometimes you’ll find people who speak Jopara, a Spanish-Guarani hybrid that varies between conversation to conversation between how much Spanish and how much Guarani is used.

• talk more about this, I need to study more

Guarani is an indigenous language to South America, part of the Tupi family. Tupi is still relatively spoken in Western Brazil, while Paraguayan Guarani is similar to Argentinian Guarani, spoken in the northern provinces of Argentina.

I partially picked Guarani because it’s a low resource language, as well as an aggulative language (similar to German). I figured that after Spanish and Arabic, I should try my hand at a language that I had to learn through Spanish.

The language itself is relatively primitive, there’s no articles (usage of the definitive is borrowed using “la” from Spanish for everything), and the language vocabulary is relatively limited. After three weeks I reached a basic comphrension level of Guarani, although the jury’s still out on whether I’m going to continue with it or not.