It's A Party in Asunción

Seven months ago we didn’t have a plan for when we were going home. Our flights to Medellín were one way with no return flight. We didn’t know where we would be or when we would be leaving so there was no point in booking something. Besides, our house is rented and we sold almost everything we own, so there were no commitments to tend to. Sometime during the 7 months, we found out that Dusty’s sister was getting married in Miami in May, so we now had a return to the States to schedule.

We thought we might fly from Buenos Aires or Montevideo, so I constantly checked in on flight prices from those cities, but wasn’t impressed. With a flight to Miami and then onward to Cincinnati, we were looking at $1000 each. Eventually, for fun I looked at Asunción, Paraguay which wasn’t a country we had considered visiting. Wouldn’t you know it was TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS LESS EACH. Not only that, we could add another country to the list. Even with the $100 visas we needed to enter, we were still saving $200 over flying from Argentina or Uruguay.

So, now we had to make our way to Asunción to fly home. I don’t know if we have become lazy or if the sort of traveling we’re doing is just so tiring. Maybe we just don’t have the drive we had at the beginning of the trip. After seeing the falls and saying farewell to Todd, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do anything at all. We laid around, ate empanadas and enjoyed the great weather in Puerto Iguazú, Argentina. We had a week to get to Paraguay’s capital city for our flight, so we kept extending our stay. Eventually, there came a day when our hostel was booked and we had to leave. The lady at the desk asked if we wanted to leave our bags while we searched for another hostel in the area. Nope, we’ll just leave the country. :)

I’d like to say we did some fabulous activities in Asunción, but we didn’t. We sat around, had an asado with some French students, saw the movie Thor and wandered around town a bit. One of the coolest things about Asunción is the fact that they are preparing for their country’s Bicentennial. National pride is abundant right now.

On our last morning in Asunción I thought, crapppp, we haven’t seen or done much in this town. At that moment I was messing around with Twitter trying to figure out how it all works. So, I did a Twitter search for Asunción to see if anything cool was going on. Only two things came up. One was spam, the other was silly. I texted Dusty, who was sitting in another room working and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we did this on our last day in South America?” He surprisingly agreed that it would be totally random, completely unlike us and “opposite balls” if we witnessed this event. How can you argue with that? We had to at that point.

QUEREMOS MILEY! QUEREMOS MILEY! QUEREMOS MILEY!

“WE WANT MILEY!” the little Paraguayan girls chanted. By the way, we would never go to a Miley Cyrus concert at home. Besides the fact that getting tickets would probably be close to impossible, going to pop concerts just isn’t our thing. But, much the same as visiting a McDonald’s in Buenos Aires to see what the Argentine version is like, we thought seeing Paraguayans super excited about an American pop singer might be interesting. We didn’t even know many of her songs, however she did do covers of Guns and Roses and Nirvana songs, so we rocked out alongside the little girls. It was also fun to hear all the little girls sing “Party in the U.S.A.” while the American flag waved on the jumbotron. Just another random, yet fun experience. How many people can say they’ve seen Miley, in concert, in Paraguay! :)