MWCJunkie

One of my last acts before leaving home was to download Roman Holiday onto my iPad, basically an excuse for Audrey Hepburn to offer 50s moviegoers a cheap tour of Rome. It's not that hard to retrace the movie's travelogue, though it turns out that Rome in July is a good deal sweatier than it looks from the back of a Vespa in black and white. To maintain a Canadian sense of presentability, especially when trying to meet vatican city's dress code, means packing paper towels and extra shirts in your day pack. Still, how can you not love a city that even at its most down and out looks so impossibly scenic? Rome is a whiff of garlic mixed with jasmine, a flash of scarlet oleander and the gleam of gilded bronze, cobblestones rough underfoot ... read more

Tuesday. Woke again to roosters, and later to three military helicopters buzzing over our heads. Strange. I spent some time reading out on our balcony, listening to the neighbourhood slowly awaken. Another lovely breakfast in the garden, overlooking the little pool on the side of the hill. We tramped up the hill to Largo dos Guimaraes, where we caught the wonderful old tram (called the bodinho) almost immediately and hung on as we hurtled all the way down the hill, clackety-clunk, past magnificent old villas decaying in that tropical way, with vines and flowers covering the old stone walls bordering the cobblestone lane. Remarking on the jerkiness of the ride, Jeff wondered what made riding the tram so special, and we soon found out. As the tracks near the bottom of the hill and enter the ... read more

Sunday - on the road again. A long day of travel after a rather less than refreshing night on the bus. We reached Sao Paulo at 8:55 a.m. as promised, and found ourselves in a huge station of the size and caliber of any city airport, with the restaurants and souvenir shops to match. More than 80 gates! We’d soon bought our tickets for Rio and were back on the bus, “convencional” this time. At least the weather was gradually clearing as we went along, from rain and lightning to patches of blue sky as we rolled through increasingly mountainous terrain, the green hills interrupted by occasional small cities and frequent explosions of industry along the highway - including a huge GM Brazil complex. Half an hour before arriving in Rio, we made a long serpentine ... read more

An excellent breakfast with Helmuth and Nicoleta: yogurt and soft-boiled eggs, juice, tea, and hugs and pictures as we said goodbye, with promises to put them up should they come our way. We couldn’t really say we’d love to come back, much as we’ve enjoyed our visit with them. Not enough to draw us back to the Chaco! But we had a great morning getting a lot of our questions and misgivings about the Mennonite work with the native people answered. Heinrich Ratzlaff was there as we arrived at Yalve Sanga, the original native settlement, to explain the work of ASCIM - the indigenous/Mennonite organization that works at social development. This was illuminating. Turns out there are actually 9 different indigenous languages/cultures they’re working with, and most can’t understand each other without Spanish (or even Low ... read more

Up at 5 a.m. to catch our taxi to the Hotel Excelsior, already waiting for us in the Casa Mennonita parking lot, chatting with the guard. “Tranquilo,” he said about our general anxiety, offering me a sip of his mate. The Excelsior turns out to be a very fancy hotel - no wonder the price (over $100) we’d been quoted, which seemed outlandish for Asuncion. A long wait in the hotel lobby gave us time to chat with several people we’d bumped into over the week - Dave and Millie Dyck from my MCC days, and Tom and Rebecca Yoder Neufeld, last seen at Canadian conference - and suddenly realize the woman standing behind us was Carol Weaver, whom I haven’t run across since college. All at 5:30 a.m. in Paraguay. Ya just never know. We ... read more