¡Más chipa por favor!
the food here is crazy good
What’s up, y’all!
Another week has flown by, and we’re still here, in the land of friends, as they like to call it. It’s true, everyone here has been so friendly and helpful. The abuela next door has begun teaching me words in Guaraní, and her son is helping us look for a house.
On Wednesday, he led us across town and out the other side of it, where he has a friend with a property for sale. It’s a beautiful lot, about 3/4 of an acre (1/3 of a hectare, which is how they measure here). It has a very large, old mango tree grove which provides shade (and mangos!) on one portion of the lot, and a large, sunny field on another side. It also has a shop and a giant covered area that would be perfect for gnob’s new garage. It has good water, and an even better view.
As I said, it’s within walking distance of town, but it’s on the other side of the hill, so it’s very quiet and muy tranquilo. It’s just about the most perfect property we’ve ever seen.
But you may have noticed I didn’t say anything about a house. 😂
The good news is, we have a great rental here, and we could live here while we built a house. The bad news is, not sure if we can afford to both buy the property and build a house. Luckily for us, the same neighbor who showed us the property has family in the construction business. I’m working on getting an estimate for building, but from some numbers I ran across a few months ago, it seems that you can build a house for only $20,000USD.
That seems insanely cheap to me, but then again, everything here seems insanely cheap to me. Like this large pizza, for $8. (no fried eggs this time!)
We both really like this property, but it always comes down to the numbers, doesn’t it? In the meantime, while we wait for an estimate, we’re still going to keep looking. We’ve got a good setup now, and we can afford to take our time and find exactly the right thing.
This morning, we went and looked at a different house for sale. This one was way out in the countryside. Even though it was only 5 kilometers (3.1 miles - I’ve already started thinking in metric, lol!) from the highway, it took about 20 minutes to get there.
It was in a beautiful, peaceful valley, and there is a creek flowing right by the property line. It has a pool, and the house was good, but the property just felt small to me after seeing the other place.
It’s a common thing here, most of the lots are only 1/10 of an acre, very small. I don’t mind that short term, like the house we’re living in now, but I can’t do that forever. I need more outdoor space!
The drive to a grocery store from that location was pretty far, too, and slow going when the roads look like this:
I’m glad we went and looked at it, though. Living remote sounds great until you run out of gas while you’re cooking, and your backup tank is also empty because you keep forgetting to take it when you go to town! 😁 Not that that would ever happen to us.
Oh yeah, most of the stoves are powered by propane, and you hook up a 10 kilo tank to it. Not sure where to buy that yet, since I haven’t run out, but I can probably get it from a street vendor driving/walking by my house. Those guys sell everything!
This week I bought a dozen limes from a guy pushing a cart down my street. It cost $1.30. I also found out that the chipa guy drives down my street most afternoons, so now I’m in trouble, because chipa has become my new favorite addiction.
Seriously, the food here is so good! Chipa is a Paraguayan staple. It’s made from mandioca (yucca) flour, egg, cheese, salt, butter and milk. The texture is kind of like a bagel, but a bagel that is slightly moist with butter and cheese. It’s so amazing, and a dude just drives right by my house with them fresh out of the tatakua every day!
I also learned this week about chipa so’o, which is basically an empanada inside of a chipa, so I’m on a quest to find some of that, pronto.🤩
In other news, we did not make it to the city this week to start our residency quest. Though gnob hates for other people to touch his truck, he’s kind of at a loss without tools. He found a great mechanic here in town, though, and got a bunch of maintenance taken care of. We didn’t get the truck back in time to go to the city, but I’m glad now, because we got to go look at this property for sale instead.
Though of course, gnob can never stop tinkering, and as soon as he got the truck back, it looked like this within a few hours.🤣
I think that covers this week. Oh, we also found a store that sells 55 pound bags of dog food for about $15. Considering we were paying $60-70 for 30 pound bag in the United States, it’s just yet another way we’ve cut costs in our lives. LOL have I convinced you to move here yet? 😜
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Have a great week!
Parting Thoughts
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I think I would live in a place for a whole year before I made any large commitments😉
I do enjoy ready your missives!!!! In my younger years I would have enjoyed living like that. Okinawa was fun and very inexpensive but the military ruled me then!!😂😂 Be blessed, Jessica. ❤️