(One from a while back that never made it up).

To call Asuncion hot during the summertime just seems lazy when english has such a long list of better words to use. Sweltering. Broiling. Melting. It’s that kind of air you get a breath of on the hottest day of the year back home, somewhere in the middle of the grocery store parking lot, half way between your car and the automatic sliding glass doors and the cool haven of AC behind them. Or at lunch time when you make your way out to your car, parked, baking in the sun all morning, get in and try to take a breath as you turn the key with one hand and simultaneously with the other push all four window buttons down in some sort of advanced finger-yoga move. It’s that air that’s so hot it just doesn’t seem to work for breathing. No oxygen here. Try again in a sec.

That’s the air we walked out of the hotel into the day we went to find ice.

This was back in our early days in Paraguay before we realized that ice is available just about anywhere – and that there was (and still is) no reason at all to walk anywhere, let alone the three blocks we were about to, to find it.

We start walking. And sweating.

We come to a rather fancy gas station – it seems a bit out of place.

‘They’ve got glass doors!’, one of us comments. ‘Chuchi.’*

We enter. It’s air conditioned. They have hot dogs on one of those rolling machines. They’re selling Budweiser and MGD. We may as well be in Miami – albeit one very tiny street corner in Miami.

‘Where’s the ice?’, I ask the clerk.

We come to find out it’s outside to the left. We head out and find the freezer right there on the side of the store like you’d find back home. Neither of us says anything but both of us are thinking something along the lines of, “this is to easy – too much like the way it’s supposed to be.” We’ve come to expect a certain level awkwardness – of random obstacles – in trying to accomplish the mundane tasks of everyday life. The height of the freezer doors is the only thing coming close to unusual here. Again, it goes unsaid, but the level of normalcy here is almost unsettling.

I climb onto a pallet, using it like a little ladder to peer inside. A dozen or so half melted bags of ice sit on the cooler floor in a puddle of their melted compadres. I reach down to the floor, teetering on my thighs as my feet leave the pallet, and snag 4 half-melted bags. I hand off two and we make our way back to the cashier.

At the glass doors we’re confronted by the pump boy, who apparently thinks he’s some sort of authority figure.

‘There is no ice’, he tells us.

I exchange confused glances with my friend. ‘Yes there is’, she tells him, holding up the evidence.

‘No. There is no ice’, he repeats and steps forward as if to confiscate what remaining ice we’ve found.

‘Yes, it’s okay, we’ll just take these’, one of us tells him.

‘There is no ice.’ (Mind you, this is all in Spanish and he is perfectly capable of elaborating). Maybe he thinks we’re gonna eat it and that it’s not safe, one of us suggests to the other, increasingly confused. We explain it’s not for drinking, just to cool beer and we have no problem paying for it.

‘No. No ice! It’s prohibited.’ He then takes the ice from us. We stand there dumbfounded and begin to laugh.

Heading back to the hotel, still sweating and still ice-less, we ask a neighboring street vendor where we can find some ice. She points across the street to an office building. We again exchange confused glances but then head across the street. It almost seems abandoned. The glass doors have nothing on the gas station’s.

‘Hola’, we say opening the door, still confused. Some one emerges from a door about 50 feet in front of us, on the other side of the lobby.

‘Adelante’, their voice carries through the air, welcoming us in the same friendly tone as if we were on her porch and not on the other side of some long ago deserted office building lobby.

‘It’s gotta be a 120 degrees in here’, one of us says as we head towards the woman in the doorway. A teenage boy sits on a sofa behind her sipping terere. It’s some sort of apartment on the ground floor of an office building? Confused glances again.

‘Can we buy ice here?’ we ask in spanish.

‘Of course’, she says and disappears into the back for a good five or so minutes. The boy on the couch stares at us as we wait. The lady returns, we pay for the ice and she casually takes our money as if this sort of thing happens all the time – although I’m pretty certain it’s fairly obvious to all of us involved that it doesn’t. We turn and go as a white fluffy dog runs across the lobby after us.

This city becomes stranger each time I visit. But always entertaining.

* Chuchi is a Paraguayan slang term for something fancier then the norm. It can be applied to nearly everything: Using parmesan cheese in the campo – chuchi; Sunglasses of any type – chuchi; Having glass doors and air conditioning – extremely chuchi. Highfalutin’ is the nearest translation we’ve come up with.

kb