What are we gonna do with all these freakin mangos?
Asunción is a city of mangos. It is truly remarkable. I have been to many cities and towns all around South America, as well as other tropical locations in Hawai'i and around Asia, but I have never seen anyplace that has even close to as many mango trees as Asunción. Now, the large red-skinned mangos that most of us here in North America find in our markets are not so common in Paraguay. What you mostly find are kidney-shaped, orange-skinned mangos. These mangos differ in several key ways from the red variety: they are sweeter, smaller, more fibrous, the numbers per tree are ginormous, and they don't last as long before they start to go bad. The latter 4 characteristics, as well as the generally poorly organized export economy of 
Paraguay, has seemed to have led to a very unfortunate situation: most people have no interest at all in these mangos. In fact, because the trees are so productive, many consider them a nuisance, and sweep the fruits up and into the garbage as they fall.
Now, for us, this was all completely tragic. In Seattle, crappy mangos cost a pretty penny, and in mango heaven, lovely ones are beneath consideration. Well, we can't do anything about all of the millions of mangos falling in everyone else's yards, but Beatriz and I were determined not to let the mangos in our house go to waste. So we set about using our mangos any way we could think of: mango juices daily, mango salsa, fruit salads with mangos, clericó (Paraguayan sangria, only way better) with mango, and huge batches of mango hot sauce and mango jelly. Our recipes for the latter two I include here. The family dog, catalina, also adores mangos, so helped us with a few a day. That is, until she started to get diarrhea, and then she went on a no-mango diet.
The fact that we were knee deep in mango preparations was causing a bit of a stir within the family and in the neighborhood, so just when we though we were beginning to make a dent in our piles of mangos, a cousin would come by with a smile and 50 more.
Speaking of family, one of the great joys of visiting Paraguay was the fact that I underwent a nearly exponential family expansion. From the day I arrived, I was introduced to an army of aunts, uncles, cousins and who knows who else. I had to stop even attempting to remember names beyond a core of about 20 direct relatives, or I would remember none, and probably forget my own.
But it was great fun, and all my new relatives were incredibly open and effusive and sharing. I also managed to regain some grandparents (my 5th grandparent Mary & all of 
my parents parents are gone now), including a great grandmother! She's a bit senile though, and most of the time thought Beatriz was Beatriz's mom, and I was Beatriz's mom's new husband.
Beatriz's grandma and grandpa are totally fabulous people, and we went and visited with them quite often. Grandma is not particularly subtle: one day she gave me a present of a towel and a bar of soap. She's also hilarious the way she shouts insults at the television. Most of these outbursts are in Guaraní, so I needed Beatriz to translate. For example, the jock in the beer commercial "has a face like an ugly horse," and the pale-faced co-host of the New Years Eve countdown special "looks like she just got over a week of diarrhea."
Well, since I mentioned diarrhea twice already, I am proud to report no major bouts of gastro-intestinal distress during the entire trip! This is significant, because I drank the water and ate everything (without a mouth) everywhere I went. In fact, the water in Asunción is very good, and tastes way better than most of the tap water I've tried in the US.
We took a few side trips out of Asunción in Paraguay during my last weeks there, the two most notable being a trip to visit great grandma in Concepción in the north, and a trip to the Ybcuí National Park in the south.
The 5 hour bus ride to Concepción passes through the Chaco, a desert like habitat 
that covers much of northwest Paraguay, and the transition from the tropical environs of Asunción into the Chaco is incredibly stark: it literally changed habitat the minute we crossed the Rio Paraguay. The Chaco has very very few human inhabitants other than a few scattered indigenous communities, but due to the recent rains had a ton of birds more typical of the Pantanal habitat of northeast Paraguay. This made for great window viewing on the way to Concepción.
Concepción is one of the largest cities in the north, and is a city of motorcycles (apparently this is a relatively recent occurrence; it used to be a city of bicycles). Crazy motorcycling youth cruise up and down the main drag at night doing one stunt crazier than the previous: standing upright, one handed, lying flat like a board, legs straight out the back, and so on. I think the kids are kinda bored in Concepción.
In our aunt's house, where great grandma is living, there is a seemingly endless supply of my female relatives: aunts, cousins, and on and on. Their primary occupation seemed to be getting me to rest, relax and eat. I was constantly being commanded to sit as if I were an invalid and stuffed full of food beyond my carrying capacity. But I drew the line when they dragged out some cots, blankets and pillows into the middle of the 
courtyard one mid-day, and tried to get me to take a siesta right in front of them, in the middle of the half-moon circle of chairs that everyone was sitting in. No, gracias.
Perhaps most notable among my relatives in Concepción is cousin Marta who makes the best Chipa Guazu (corn and cheese casserole) I tasted anywhere. I took pictures of her making it, and have posted a pictorial recipe here.
The trip to Ybycuí National Park was definitelty a highlight. It wasn't easy to get to... We took a bus to the end of the line, and then walked the "4km" to the park, which was more like 
8km, down an old dusty road past the town of Minas Cué. There, on the side of the road, I spotted a familiar looking plant: "I think that's a milkweed," I said. And then, as if on cue, an elusive Southern Monarch Butterfly, Danus erippus, flew by, and then another! My colleague Steve Malcolm from Kalamazoo 
had asked me to keep my eyes open for monarchs, since nothing is known about their populations in Paraguay. I got off a few not-so-great pictures before they flew away; still, Steve was quite pleased. We felt vindicated in our tiring trek through the afternoon sun.
Ypcuí is a bit of an 
oasis in the midst of this landscape, almost like a mini rain forest, complete with cascading falls, swimming holes, native vegetation, and heaps of cool bugs. Among the most impressive is the Morpho butterfly, an enormous bug with brilliant irridescent azure flashes on it's upper wings as it flies past. We also communed with a mantis, and saw one of the strangest, coolest bugs I have ever seen: a totally trippy leaf footed bug (family Coreidae).
Here are a bunch of pictures from Ypycuí, as well as some other random shots from Paraguay.
My last days in Paraguay were filled with running around seeing friends and relatives, cooking and eating as many mangos as humanly possible, and buying gifts for everyone including my gift to myself: Nacho (Bee's dad) helped me pick out a bunch of LP's from Paraguay, which has a deep and fantastic musical heritage that is very poorly known around Latin America, since most of it is in Guarani. Luckily, I have a translator living with me.
Thus loaded down, amazingly with more gifts than when I arrived, I boarded the bus to Buenos Aires for my flight north. Bee, Nacho & Licha (her mom) and Tio Candido and his fantastic kids came to see me off at the bus station. I've done a lot of traveling around South America, and I can say that I have always been a little jealous of the people who had family waving to their loved ones as the bus pulled away from the station. But this time I, too, felt like I was leaving home and, though I was sad to go, that felt nice.
p.s. sorry for the delay in posting this final chapter. I was embroiled during the month of February in a cool, creative blogging project called thing-a-day. In the unlikely event that you haven't already read enough (i.e. if you're my mom), my 29 posts from the month are collected here.