Oi gente, We made it to Brazil.. Actually about a week ago- And now we are happily relaxing at my grandmothers house in my birth city, Londrina (that means little London). Its not that little though, and not really like London either for that matter. I may be biased, but I personally love it here. My family is enormous, and in line with the Brazilian stereotype, they are all incredibly welcoming and generous. I am having a blast introducing Stephen to favorite foods from my childhood, and reminiscing about the past. I think we are going to chill here for a couple of weeks. No jobs = no hurry right?? Anyway, rewinding to a week ago, we finally got the chance to visit Foz Iguacu. We took a hotel organized tour to the Argentina side, but ... read more

Buenas Dias! We have just spent 5 very full days in Asuncion. From the brevity of the Paraguay section in our travel book one would think there isn´t much to this place, but thats definitely not true... We have been livin it up in the city for sure. We are staying at the resonably priced Pension Da Silva, run by a very cute and friendly old lady. The place is centrally located, right off Plaza Uruguay. Its clean and perfectly comfortable but without frills. The city itself is actually really low-key. By about 7 pm almost everything (save restaurants and clubs) shuts down for the night. Incidentally this fits right in with my 10-11-hours-of-sleep-per-night plan, so its is great by me. It rained bananas for the first 2 days we were here, but that didn´t stop ... read more

Yo! Ok, this is a quick special report, especially for VLM. We went to the Santa Cruz Zoo this afternoon. This is a seriously wacky zoo. For instance, there were almost as many animals roaming freely about the grounds as there were safely in cages. Among the animals that scampered accross our footpath were: a sloth (well, it more slothed than scampered), a capibara, and an alarmingly large monkey of sorts. That one was actually sitting on the fence OUTSIDE of the monkey cages of its same species (see photo). The main purpose of our visit was to find and photograph a giant Anteater. (For those of you who don´t know, Stephen´s mother, Vicki is an avid collector of all things Anteater/Aardvark). We searched the joint for hours for the illusive beast and it was not ... read more

Hi again all! We are back in La Paz and have been for a few days (that last blog was a few days late in publishing)... Long story short, we almost bought a car to drive back to California and decided not to at the last minute. I admit, at first it was MY idea. I had secret visions of rescuing a puppy and bringing it home with us. We looked at the car several times and I was dubious whether it would have even gotten us to Brazil, much less the US (it was a 1975 Toyota Landcruiser) even though Stephen in all his extensive auto mechanics knowledge insisted that it would make it (anyone pick up on the sarcasm there?). But really we both decided it was for the best if we postponed our ... read more

¡Buenos Dias! We are still in La Paz, 8 days later.. We had planned on leaving this morning, but upon learning that tickets for the World Cup qualifier match of Bolivia vs Venezuela go on sale TOMORROW morning, we decided to stay another night. Everyone wish us luck getting tickets. The box office opens at 9am and we are going to be there at 7 sharp. Speaking of event tickets, since we now have some experience with this I am going to pontificate upon this subject briefly. There is no Ticketmaster here, no Stubhub... The system is much more democratic in fact, if you want tickets to something, you usually show up to the venue day of event and buy them, period. I like that because it makes it possible for those who want to attend ... read more