Going by Landmarks

By Bobby Neal Winters

The street that I am staying on while I’m in Paraguay is Legion Civil Extranjero.  Google translate makes this out to be Foreign Civil Legion.  This makes no sense to me, so I am going to simply believe it means Foreign Legion for no other reason than it just seems romantic.  (This street runs parallel to one called Senador Huey Long, named for the US Senator, who is either famous or infamous depending upon your point of view.) 

So I am staying on Foreign Legion Street in Asuncion, Paraguay. I don’t know the address or even that it has one.  The only thing I’ve seen is Legion Civil Extranjero casi de Las Palmeras.  “Casi” is Spanish for “almost” and Las Palmeras refers to the street that runs east-west just south of us; and we are “almost” on the corner.  

In a city of a million people, this might seem kind of imprecise, but I’ve given those coordinates to a cabbie downtown, and he got us there without a blink: 

“Nos gustaría a ir Legión Civil Extranjero casi de Las Palmeras, por favor.”  

“Si.”

And we arrived without adventure for the price of less than $5.

Walking can be an adventure.  Street signs are rare compared to the US, and you don’t always want to be checking the map on your phone because it’s never a good idea in any city to let strangers know that you don’t know where you are.

You learn to navigate by landmarks.

One of my favorite landmarks is El Colegio Las Almenas, which I had been mis-translating as “The German School,” but that is not correct.  The German School would be Colegio Aleman.  This is School of the Battlements.  When you look at their website, it appears to be an all girls school.

Regardless, it is my favorite landmark because it is at the corner of Legion Civil Extranjero and Dr. Toribio Pacheno.  I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the second street, and it is important.  Take it going to the east, and you will very shortly find yourself at a “Biggie” store.  You could think of “Biggie” as an upscale Dollar General Store which has a greater selection of food, or you could just think of it as an old-fashioned neighborhood market for the modern age.

Come down here and make up your own mind.

In the other direction, there is a restaurant called “O Gaucho.”  This is in Portuguese.  It can be translated roughly as, “The Cowboy.”

For those of you who know what a churrascaria is, it is a churrascaria.  For those of you who don’t know, a churrascaria is a meat restaurant.  I could call it a barbecue restaurant, but then we get into deep philosophical territory.  Does barbecue require sauce?  What is the quintessence of barbecue?  

There are those who charcoal a steak and call it a barbecue.  There are those who say barbecue can’t be beef. There are those who say it must have sauce, but the sauce can’t be sweet. (This reminds me of the distinction between homoousios and homoiousios in the arguments surrounding the Arian Heresy.)

So we flee the English language for the sake of avoiding religious arguments.  A churrascaria is a place where they have a buffet of side dishes, many of which are quite substantial, but the main attraction is that well-muscled young men come around to your table with skewers of meat that have been cooked over wood fires.  The meat is in various levels of doneness from medium-well to “put me back in the cow and I will live again.” 

There will be the occasional platter of chicken hearts and finally a dessert cart. 

All for about $25 a head.

Yes, Colegio Las Almenas is one of my favorite landmarks.

When you travel by landmarks, you have to be more tuned into your environment.  Traveling with a GPS nav-system makes you lazy, it makes you soft, you ignore your environment and take orders from a Godless machine.  You might as well be ruled by Skynet because you’ve turned over your freewill to a machine already. 

When you give up GPS and even give up street names, you pay attention to where the construction is, which yards have dogs, what the businesses are, where the sidewalks are good, where the new paint is. You tune-in to your environment. You are more alive than you ever have been.

They do have GPS here.  It does work.  Getting around by learning the neighborhood is a personal choice I’ve made.  I don’t know when I will pass this way again, if ever, and I want to soak up every moment.

Greetings from Paraguay. Dios te acompañe hasta que regresemos.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )