Fish soup and spaghetti with beans

It´s Saturday and my Armani suits still have not arrived. I have an insurance policy for this vacation and after what seemed like no results from the airline that brought us here, I decided to call the policy´s Travel Advisor or Travel Assistant or whatever they call themselves. They allow you to call collect. FYI to make a collect call from Caazapa, Paraguay to the US, dial 0012. Let me backtrack a moment. We flew from home to Chicago and then to Miami on an AMERICAN AIRLINE whose name shall remain anonymous so that I am not libel or committing libel or whatever you say when you write something bad about a person or company. From Miami to Sao Paulo, Brazil and on to Asuncion, Paraguay, we flew on a non-AMERICAN carrier. The folks in Asuncion tried but didn´t seem to get any help or response from the American Airline.

My travel insurance dude connected me to the American Airline and stayed on the line to help me. The lady at the American Airline was not very cooperative or helpful at first. I didn´t have the baggage claim tickets with me because we left them in Asuncion with our rental car agent. Our rental car agent is going to claim our bags and put them on a bus so that they get to us eventually. So the lady on the phone from the American Airline said she couldn´t help us if we didn´t have the baggage claim tickets because otherwise she just had a blank computer screen. Even though I wanted to reach through the phone line and strangle her with her own headset, I managed to stay calm. I explained to her a little of what happened and she miraculously was able to search recent claims by my last name and found out that the bags were still in Chicago and that they were scheduled to go out that afternoon with a possible arrival in Asuncion on Saturday afternoon. I then asked that if they didn´t arrive on Saturday, and I call back, would they be able to tell me with certainty that the bags left Chicago. She said she couldn´t because they would be transferred to another non American Airline once they arrived in Miami. I couldn´t get it through her thick skull that I was not concerned about the other carrier, that I wanted to be able to know if the bags left Chicago. Finally she relented that superivisors could do a sort of world trace that goes beyond the American Airline and might be able to help me with that. Geez! I think there have been terrorists who have given more information with less prodding than this lady. Afterwards my travel insurance dude said that now that we have the baggage claim numbers again, he will be able to help us track the luggage if it doesn´t arrive.

Our drive to Caazapa in our rental car was a bit of a mess. We were given directions from our hotel to get to the ¨ruta¨ but the lack of clear street signs or road signs or city signs got us all kinds of mixed up. Raquel doesn´t know the way, and the last time I drove, my brother-in-law was the navigator. We got really good directions from a gentleman who was waiting for his wife/girlfriend/sister/friend. Those directions got us to a fork of two rutas. I don´t know why, but I got my thinking all screwed up and took the wrong ruta. By the time we found out we were headed in the wrong direction, we had travelled a good ways out of the way. Fortunately we were given some good directions on a short cut to get us back on the correct ruta.

So we´ve been in Caazapa a couple of days now and Lourdes loves being out in the nice weather playing with her family, chasing chickens, and showing off how cute she is. The food has been pretty good over all. The meat is usually a little tough, but tolerable. We had a couple of traditional meals to include a fish soup one time and spaghetti with beans another time. They were both quite good, the only complaint about the fish soup would be the tiny bones that are inherent in certain fish and the fact that the skin was left on it.

Time to go.