Would you like chipas with that?

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Time to get ourselves to Asuncion. Overcoming our confusion about Guaranis (about 5000 to the U.S. dollar -- WHY did we not practise those big numbers in Spanish??), we managed to buy a ticket to Asuncion on NSA (Nuestro Senora de Asuncion), what appeared to be a big bus company. Apparently, directo does not mean in Paraguay what it does to gringos. Direct, yes, with about a hundred stops at teeny bus shacks in the little villages strung along Paraguay's No. 1 highway.

The bus, thankfully, was a comfortable happy medium between the worst and best of the previous days, and the trip's unexpected length of 5 1/2 hours was tempered by our decision to try the baked good that has appeared with tremendous regularity since the moment we hit the Paraguay border: chipas (pronounced CHEE-pass), a sort of cornbread stuffed with a little cheese, always dispensed by street hawkers from enormous baskets lined with spotless linen. We struck gold with our first try, yummy fresh buns sold aboard the bus that were cheap and filling and kept nicely. Jeff was instantly hooked, and is now looking about for a recipe.

We got to Asuncion annoyingly late -- it was supposed to be 4:30 p.m., and was more like 5:30 by the time we reached the bustling bus station, where, contrary to what we'd been led to believe, no MWC rep could be found. And the opening service of the assembly was to start at 5! Armed with the address we'd been given, we hopped in a cab. The driver found the right street in about 15 minutes, but it was yet another cheek-flapping rubble road, this time in a dark suburb. The enormous church we were expecting was nowhere to be seen. "Es iglesia mas grande!" we despairingly told him. Then we remembered there was a phone number to call - so cabbie hauled out his cellphone and, after a 10 minute conversation in Spanish standing in the street (no light in the car), he had the directions straight. We pulled up a few minutes later in front of an enormous, floodlit, spanking white edifice, five storeys high, with huge windows, a grand staircase entrance, and oh, so welcome -- a big sign advertising Congreso de Menonita Mondial. Home, in a weird way. We, and our banner, had missed the big banner parade, but we were in time to grab our headphones (for interpretation) and watch a bunch of costumed Paraguayan youth enacting a sort of dance-drama featuring folk music and dance of the various continents represented in the audience and describing their unity in Christ. A Zimbabwe choir sang, making us nostalgic for six years ago. Outgoing president Nancy Heisy delivered a keynote address and a blessing for new president Danisa Ndlovu of Zimbabwe, with our own Betty Puricelli translating. All in all, a rich start to the week. And a hug from young Alvaro in the lobby after, part of a big group there from the New Life church.

Then it was time to get our bus to Casa Mennonita. Signs had been set up on newly sodded grass (sucking our feet into the mud) for various lodgings, and we were pretty much the last group to be led to our bus, rolling our wheelies for several blocks over rubble sidewalks and rubbly road, to yet another brightly painted stinking diesel rust bucket, unaccountably left running (and polluting the neighbourhood) for a good 20 minutes before we finally took off (lurch, creak, rattle, roar and strain, rumble, lurch forward, squeal, lurch to a stop, rattle, rumble ...). Rolling through Asuncion's streets at night is a little surreal: here a hovel, there a brightly lit Burger King, here a mansion, there a hole in the wall dispensa. Government buildings, military and police establishments and embassies are always grand, floodlit, surrounded by police in brown uniforms, pants stuffed into their boots. Foreign companies and the occasional upscale shop have huge sheets of plate glass and self-conscious bits of English on their neon signs; everything else looks shabby, stained in red dust, crumbling and peeling, including Asuncion's own version of the Recoleta cemetery.

Casa Menonita is a Low German haven in the big, unglittering city - a wee bit offputting to those of us who've tried to get away from that sort of thing. When we weren't quite making ourselves understood to the desk clerk checking in, another guest helpfully tried translating her question into Deutsch -- and it was as though the scales fell from my ears! Huh, guess I've retained more German than I thought. Nevertheless, our expectations for a cama de matrimonio - a double bed - were disappointed. (We got a simple room with twin beds, a shower, an old-fashioned toilet with a pull cord, and a space heater high on the wall with a remote control. No TV, but to our pleasant shock, wireless in the room!) We wondered whether the room choice was a plot in this vaary Mannonite place to keep people they suspected weren't really so matrimonio -- different last names and for safety sake we left our rings at home -- from doing the hanky panky in their heilige zimmer. Never mind, we're too tired anyway.

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