Avispas, whale brains, and walking cheese puffs...

 

Today was round four in the war against wasps on the Kinder/pre-Kinder playground.  They invaded my classroom and landed on my students, so I sprayed them (the wasps, not the students) with bleach and smashed them with behavior notebooks (again, not the students).  Then I called in the heavy-duty arsenal who vowed to pull the whole air-con unit out of the wall and eradicate the entire nest for good...THIS. IS. PARAGUAY!!!       Sorry...I couldn't resist.

So, the fun part of teaching kindergarten is that you learn some really random vocabulary.  Especially now that they know I'm trying to learn Spanish, my little ones are cheerfully fulfilling all my vocabulary needs...as long as I only ever want to talk about zoo animals and Bible characters. 

Some random vocab to throw into your next conversation:

avispas-wasps

espinas-thorns

gordo-fat

permiso-excuse me

mono-monkey

Last Monday was the Dia de los Heros, so we got a the day off from work.  It was wonderful having a three day weekend, let me tell you that!  My housemate, another teacher, and I went to the Asuncion zoo.  It's very small, but we had fun.  We saw hippos, a jaguar, and a very friendly toucan.  We also saw lots, and lots, and lots of ants.  Not surprising really, ants pretty much inhabit every square foot of ground here in Paraguay (and our kitchen counters). Here in Paraguay there are tiny ants, giant ants, ants with square heads, ants with triangle heads, ants that eat bugs, ants that carry leaves, ants that bite, and ants that run for cover.... It's like living in the movie, only cooler, and with less chance of getting your head crushed.

He wanted to greet us up close!

Show off... :)

 

This "little" guy is as big as your thumbnail!

 

We also got to see some...um, interesting, preserved animals (described as a "ghoulish collection" in the PY guide book).  Such as badly stuffed birds, a very cool collection of the giant bugs that Paraguay has to offer, and some pickled whale brain.  Yup, that's right, pickled whale brain.  How many of you can say you've seen that? Don't worry, it was about as nasty as it sounds.

It's looking at you!

 

Them's some big vertebrae!

                                                       

  Wait...is that cheese puff moving? 

 *On a random side note, I discovered that if you blow on a stream of sugar ants, they'll all freeze in place till you stop. My housemate was less impressed with this than she was with the fact that if you drop them in water they drown really, really fast. Basically, I've decided to give up on fighting the ants, and just have fun with them.

 

Now that we are in March (and Fall-that-looks-like-Spring), I'm excited to get to Easter Break.  Jacqui and I are hoping to do some traveling outside of Asuncion. We can't wait to see something new and maybe eat something more complicated than pasta and chicken. :)

We couldn't resist...