Lake Ypacarai near San Bernardino, Paraguay 

We arrived in Asunsion at 10 a.m. one Friday in August, 2010, on a connecting flight from Buenos Aires. From the plane window, my first impression of Paraguay was red. There was red soil and palm trees as far as I could see.

From this vantage point it reminded me of India, a good impression. We like India. We had never been to South America before, but had decided to make it our home. We were newly retired and knew that we could not have a comfortable lifestyle on our pensions in the UK. Our pension provider had gone bust and future prospects were looking grim, so we decided that it was time to go.

We had done extensive research online and chosen Paraguay because of the availability of water, farmland, and a small, young population for a big space. We had already decided that we wished to seek permanent residency, so had come with all the required documents legalised by the Paraguayan consulate in the UK. We had arranged a lawyer to assist us from a contact in the UK. The permanent residency process began immediately and we are now just waiting for the final signatures to be granted permanent residency in this beautiful country.

I struggled with trying to decide where Paraguay reminded me of in the first few weeks here. The traffic was noisy and the buses belch fumes. This reminded me of India and some Mediterranean cities. But that wasn’t quite right as it didn’t look like that. Central Asuncion is quite elegant and built up like any other major city. There were vendors of this and that on the buses, shoe shine boys, things that I didn’t see anymore in the UK. Then the penny dropped. Asunción is itself, familiar enough to be comfortable but different enough to be interesting.

Everyone, including the Paraguayans, describes Paraguay as a third-world country. There are major arteries of asphalt roads from city to city and larger towns, while other routes still have dirt roads. There is no railway. Much cargo still arrives on the river.

Has my lifestyle suffered? Certainly not. My food is fresher and frequently grown in Paraguay. It is vine ripened and not flown halfway across the world in a gas-filled container. This results in food that tastes like it should. And it is seasonal; if it is not strawberry time, there are no strawberries.
I prefer this to year round accessibility to fruit with no taste. Any food imported is usually from Argentina or Brazil.
Eating out is also good. There are good quality restaurants that are expensive for people here but do not break a western budget. There are some international brands such as Burger King and McDonald’s but these are not on every corner. Most places to eat are still small and privately owned. Around the corner from where we live the bar owner can be seen at around 6 p.m. happily making his own burgers.
The lack of imposed health and safety regulation is refreshing, returning me to an age where people were allowed and expected to take some responsibility for their own safety, even if this raises the occasional eyebrow when bits of masonry fly off a roof.
The fixed-line telephone network is expensive and tired; so this has resulted in 85% of the population having mobile phones. We have wi-fi internet that is a bit more expensive than in the UK, but a connection that is fast enough to use VOIP and allows us to bypass the expensive overseas costs of the phone provider.
We have not yet seen every season in Paraguay, but there is sun–lots of it–resulting in a profusion of beautiful plants and trees. Occasionally something will catch our eye, familiar but strange. Then the realisation that a temperamental little houseplant in the UK is in it’s natural home here and six feet tall.
Every month there are new flowers and colours in the trees, leading us to wait in excitement for what will come next. In January the mangoes ripened and have been dropping off the trees, people gather them and leave spares on a wall for passers by. We don’t know the names of most of the trees here, but it doesn’t matter, they are still beautiful and we know that the chance we took going to a different place is going to give us years to learn.
Jean in Paraguay
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Jean is a contributing reader who recently moved from England to Asuncion, Paraguay. Her blog is at http://paraguayrelocation.wordpress.com.