Ellen in Paraguay

Well, vacations are officially over and the weather turned a little cold again, but I am still enthusiastic, rejoicing over the wonderful two weeks I had, and looking forward to the return of Ocsar and Karen and Ben and Vivi. Plus we are expecting many north American visitors during the month of August, so I’m glad for all the Spanish practice I’ve had and anticipating translation practice. One compliment I learned here that I want to start using in English is sos percha “you’re a hanger” i.e. “you look good in anything.” I heard someone use that once on Ben.
I’ve made two interesting language discoveries lately: A common way of saying you’ve done something in vain is to do en balde literally“in bucket” and changing the preposition to “of” or “from bucket” de balde means “for nothing.” Thus, when I went to Argentina and we had to wash from a bucket, we were literally bathing in vain!
Second observation: the common word for wedding or marriage is “casamiento,” in which I only recently noticed the root casa “house” and so I guess it means something like a house-making? I joked that my friends Carolina and Alcildes didn’t really have a casamiento last month, because after getting married they moved into her bedroom in her dad’s house…they had a pieza-miento, a room-making!
My highlight of the weekend was playing Trivial Pursuit. I proudly announced that the game was invented by Canadians. This is obvious when playing the English version due to the over-proportionate amount of obscure Canadian political and historical facts, like who was Samuel D. Champlain or who was the eighth premier of Saskatchewan? Maybe Canadians won’t know the answer to the latter, but at least we know what a premier is and where Saskatchewan is located. My biggest challenges in the Paraguayan version were questions likes “how do you say dance in Guarani” (it’s jeroky) or chronologically who was the first Paraguayan poet? I had a lucky guess on which South American country produces the most salt (Chile, lots of coastline!) and I learned that Beethoven’s 9th, symphony, otherwise known as “Ode to Joy,” is the only coral symphony.
The picture is some of the friends I made at camp in Argentina.