Second Mundial post

I posted Paraguay's Pechugon commercial below. One of the other ubiquitous sounds of the Mundial is Shakira's "Esto Es Africa," the official song of the World Cup. It's on every cellphone, every radio, every MP3 player. The Spanish and English versions are posted here.

Spanish


English

Mundial

We're all watching the world cup down here, pretty much daily. In Paraguay, one of the companies sponsoring the Albirroja (The red and the white, the colors of the national team) is Pechugon - a chicken seller. This ad gets played constantly on TV. Enjoy!

Random snaps

Some of these are older, some newer. Either way, they're photos I like that I haven't been able to put up yet.

Also, Paraguay won today!

Sinjin, vaquerro.

I got to tour one of my neighbor's land with him. We took the horses. This means fun photos for you guys.

Culinary dispatch!

Today, in flagrant disregard to vegetarians, PETA, and hippy-dippy vegans, you're going to learn how that chicken goes from feathered flapper to delicious caldo de gallina. That's right people. Sinjininparaguay: Culinary dispatch!

You'll want to pick a hen, or gallina, that's already started to produce eggs. They're fatter, apparently, and if they have any unlaid eggs inside, you can eat those too.


Wring its neck. Avoid the spontaneous and energetic wing flapping. Easily accomplished by hold it by its legs.

Submerge in boiling water. Then hang from a tree and pluck its feathers. This only takes four or five minutes.


Continue by dismembering the chicken - first remove the head and neck, and rip out it's gullet. Then cut out the wings and drumsticks.

At this point, things get messy. Cut the body open, remove the kidneys, liver, belly fat, lungs, and heart. Then pull out the intestines - they're bright yellow!



Cut the bird into sections, cook.

My future house

Teofilo Marin

Teofilo Marin first met his wife as a mita-y, as a child. Of course, he didn't know he would marry Ursulina then, they were just playmates. But years later, just back from his 20-month stint in the military, Marin saw his old playmate at a party in a nearby compania.
"I don't remember it at all," says Ursulina, his wife, and the mother of their eight children.

As it happened, he had an in - Marin's brother had already married one of Ursulina's sisters. He would travel by foot or horse to her house, 5k distant.

Marin is just one of the many inhabitants of Potrero Pucu, a village of about 400 on the outskirts of Caballero. Like his fellow townsfolk, Marin works in the chacra (fields), cultivating maize, peanuts, mandioca, beans, and other cash crops and basic foodstuffs.

It's what he always imagined he would do, but it's still difficult.

"There's not anything easy about working in the chacra," he says. "Its heaviest (or most difficult) in the summer because of the heat.' He wakes at four to avoid the hottest part of the day. The years of farming have left their mark. Marin is lean and wiry. His hands look and feel like baseball mitts, and the hot sun has carved seams and canyons across his face that crease and ripple as he laughs at a joke or casts a concerned glance at Albertito, his grandchild.
Marin and his neighbors have lived in Potrero Pucu on and off their whole lives. Marin lived in Asuncion for five years, commuting weekly or monthly to visit his wife and children. Life was different, he says.

"In the era of Stroessner, there was more security," he says. But even if life seems more uncertain now, he still prefers it.

"We didn't have the opportunity [we have now]," he says. There was no high school in the community - the nearest was in Caballero, 7km away. "There weren't buses, you had to go by horse, or at times, on foot...and we didn't have sandals. We went to school barefoot," he told me.

There wasn't radio, nor light. "We didn't have electricity before - we had a little light made of metal that used kerosene. We didn't have cell phones either," he said.
"So there are advantages and disadvantages," he says.

site presentation!

Misty morning

Some pictures.