Ode to Steve

Today, as some of you may or may not know, is my father's 50th birthday. Unfortunately, I find myself a considerable distance away from him, unable to properly shower him with love and gifts. So sitting here, pondering my dilemma I had what I believe to be a stroke of genius. As a gift I shall dedicate an entire post to the "showering of love" of my dad, Steven Allen Ramp. Here it goes:

My father was born on August 29th, 1958 to Hank and Judy Ramp. (To be honest I don't know every detail of my dad's childhood, so I'm gonna skip to the part where I'm alive and could enjoy his presence...:)

I have been blessed to be able to spend 18 wonderful years with my father and look forward to countless more. He's always been there for me for whatever I need. He is a provider, not simply financially, but with every other aspect as well. If I need to talk or advice, he's always willing to listen. "Mr. Fix-It" as we call him, is perfectly suited to his personality. Not only is he ridiculously talented at making household appliances work (especially the silverware drawer that was the most annoying thing in the world to rip open), but any problem I've ever seemed to have with any type of authority figure, he's taken care of with ease. He just has a way of getting his way, and when he's on your side, it's truly amazing the progress your team makes.

My dad was there to help me shoot my first (and only) deer. He was also on board, standing beside me, coaching when I landed a 46 lb. king salmon. If you are ever looking for how to cook the best tasting king salmon in the world, talk to my dad about talking some private lessons. I know few other people who could get so excited telling me about their day at work (granted he does go look at amazing wildlife, but still...). Other skills include the aptitude to play Solitaire for extraordinarily long extended periods of time.

My dad has taught me basically everything I know about responsibility and all accomplishments thus far in my life are due to the time and love he's given me. I'll never be able to repay everything he's given me and my writing could never due him justice. However, I hope my feeble attempt at displaying his splendor on this most important day has at least brought a smile to his face.

I love you Dad! Happy 50th! Here's to another 50 years of happiness!

Mi Cumpleanos

The fingers being used to write this sentence have now been in existence for 18 years. Pretty exciting, eh? My birthday celebration itself was relatively uneventful. I woke up about 9 to find no one else in my house, but 10 minutes later my mom and aunt came rushing up to me, arms open prepared to hug. My mom then scurried away to her bedroom and came back with two shiny packages in hand. Unsure of the correct gift-receiving protocol I took the presents graciously as my mom quickly began telling me to open them. Inside the first package was a maroon-colored leather mini-backpack (Berett, now I can be a little like you) and in the second was a semi-matching wallet. They are both really cool and I'm already using them to tote around my stuff.

After gift-giving concluded, we headed out to my grandparents farm for a bit. My little cousin Marcos and I had fun playing with the color accent feature of my camera (Thanks Jub for the expert opinion on camera selection. I love it and all the kids in my Spanish class are jealous!). We ate some lunch including the typical mandioca, which is some sort of starch that I've eaten plain, cubed, and as potato chips. It's pretty awesome eating on a farm and knowing that half of the food your eating was grown on the same land your sitting. In fact today I had an omelet filled with cheese that my grandma somehow made (I don't know why, but up till now I seemed to have forgotten that cheese was actually made). After the farm we headed home where I napped for a bit.

That evening I headed over to my friend Jazmin's house where we had a small birthday party for me. Since we had school the next day, we didn't go that late and spent our time eating pizza, cake, and playing Paraguayan Pictionary. I'm quickly discovering that down here they have many of the same games, but with different rules. For instance, Pictionary is played with the same board and set of cards (in Spanish of course), but the rest of the game is played like Charades. Another example is Five-Card-Draw which we play without betting at all. I simply go with the flow and all seems to be fine. All in all it was a good celebration of adulthood.

Oh and in my mother's honor, the day after I ate some birthday cake for breakfast. Aren't you proud Mom?

My First Beauty Pageant

Everyday after school, I have a required Spanish class with all the other AFS students living in Ciudad del Este. The best thing about it is being able to see everyone and talk about how everything is going (most of the Spanish we´re going over I already know...the alphabet...parts of the body...etc.). We all discovered on Monday that Kate, a girl from Missouri, had somehow been selected to represent her school in a beauty pageant. She was pretty confused as to what she actually had to do, but wanted us all there for moral support. So....

Last night we all showed up at the Club Nautico in Hernandarias around 8 o´clock to discover that the show was a little larger than we had imagined. The venue was outside, in the center of some sort of fair grounds complete with a ferris wheel. There was a band playing quite loudly on stage, surrounded by strobe lights. The pageant itself didn´t start for an hour or so, and Linny (a friend from the U.S.) and I managed to sneak backstage for a quick peak at what was going on. What we found was pretty hillarious. Kate was standing in a room full of very sparkly, scantily clad Paraguayan girls, looking quite confused. She too was spiffed up, but with a little less skin showing. My favorite outfit had to be the tight jeans with the drastic fade on the butt paired with a hoodie that was cut just at the bottom of the girls chest, but high enough to see her bra. After feeding our appetites for ridiculous spectacles, we found our seats and waited for the show to begin.

There were 19 participants and each one was instructed to walk on stage and down the catwalk, strutting their stuff. Each one succeeded at completing this task. There were three different outfits. The first seemed denim themed from the hips down, accompanied with some sort of shiny top and, as always, heels. The second outfit had to consist of some sort of clothing from one of the sponsors, and the third and final ensemble was a dress of their choice. I´m sad to say that Kate did not win. However she did look fabulous and didn´t fall or trip at all. We did all manage to have lots of fun cheering her on and exploring the fair grounds. All in all, it was a quite successful first night out without my sister.

An Only Child

I am now an only child. I just got back from a day or so in Asuncion (Paraguay's capital), sending my host sister off to France for a year. We certainly did make quite a group between Anahi's mother, father, best friend, half-brother, boyfriend, and I. Plus there was a friend of my mom's named Victor who lived in Asuncion and seemed to be our guide. We were supposed to leave Wednesday at 9:00 AM, but due to the effects of Paraguayan time, we were probably on the road around 10:00. It was a five hour drive, plus an hour for lunch. I tend to be prone to car sickness so I was sure to sleep the whole way.

After we got to Asuncion, we headed for the city's center in search of our "apartamento" and after asking three different pedestrians we found it. I was surprised at how large the place actually was. There were at least two bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room and something resembling an office. I suppose it had to be pretty large in order to accommodate us all. We didn't hang out long though; simply dropped our stuff off and headed off again, this time in search for the woman who baptized Anahi. We managed to find her, her two small daughters and their two small dogs and hung out for an hour or so. The rest of the night was spent watching a movie (a pretty bad one called The Foreigner), played cards, eating the largest burgers I'd ever seen (they consisted of strip of steak, a fried egg, ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and bun), and sleeping as much as we could considering that we had to be at the airport by 2:00 AM for Anahi's flight.

1:00 AM came pretty quickly for me...in fact a little too quickly I think. We packed up into our two cars and set off for the airport. We ended up not leaving the airport until a little after 5:00 AM because we wanted not only to say goodbye, but to also wait until the plane was ready to go so that we could watch it actually take off. It was kinda cool I admit, I was just a bit tired at the time. The trip back was relatively uneventful, seeing how everyone our car slept the whole way. Luckily my host mom says I don't have to go to school today, so I can spend it lounging about, catching up on any sleep and writing this post.

Sweet 15

As I have quickly discovered, in Paraguay they don´t have big ¨Sweet 16¨ parties like the stereotypical American does. Instead they have massive 15th Birthday parties. And they are huge! I got to go to one on Thursday night with my host sister and it was crazy. First of all, it didn´t start till about 10 at night (like most nightime activites), but being on Paraguayan time, we got there about 11. From the street the entrance was all decked out like an Egyptian palace and once we entered, it only got better. There was a main dining room with tables, which I understood to be for the more important guests. All of the teenagers crowded around the doorways while the birthday girl climbed down from this grand staircase wearing one of largest dresses I´ve ever seen. It was completely white and covered in sparkles and must have weighed a ton...there was so much volume to it! She danced with her father and a couple of my male classmates. After passing through a smaller room, filled with every kind of food imaginable, we reached what appeared to be the kids´hangout. There were couches and a dance floor and a bar and tables of food....

After the birthday girl had been ¨presented¨ to what seemed like everyone in Paraguay, we went to the dance floor to watch a group of dancers. This part of the night seemed to resemble a bachelorette party more than anything else, considering the fact that the women were wearing only a bra (with glitter, of course), underwear, and fishnet stockings. The men had on jeans, black mesh muscle tanks, and some sort of plastic outer shell. It was pretty hillarious watching people from ages 6 to 60 watch the performers dance. Let´s just say their style of dancing wouldn´t have flown at a Sitka High dance. :) It was definitely a completely new experience!

Photos

So my struggle to post pictures continues. I did manage to get a few posted online in a roundabout sort of manner. After waiting for 45 minutes, trying to upload the pictures to Facebook, and after having downloaded them to my computer as the smaller, supposedly faster files, Facebook unfairly denied my request to upload. Then I spent literally 2 hours waiting for them to attach themselves to an email, which I sent to my mother. From there I had Hunter upload the pictures as an album on his profile on Facebook. So....if you want to see pictures and haven't already, check out Hunter's Facebook page, or go to "Photos of Allison" on my Facebook profile page. Sorry for all the trouble, but sometimes dial-up is really a drag.

Healthy and Happy

Oh yeah. I kinda left you all on a somber note a few posts ago, but I'm all recovered from the stomach thing. Hopefully it'll be the last of my ailments abroad...

Rules of the Road?

So the longer I spend staring out the car window, trying to figure out the rules of the road, the more confused I become. For starters, there are no stoplights that I've seen. I can count the number of stop signs I've seen on one hand. Plus, there's no line in the middle of the road and I've definitely ridden on both sides of it. The speed limits are definitely optional...my mom sometimes drives 120 km/hr in a 60 km/hr zone. I've also never seen a cop pull anyone over, have sirens on, or do any type of enforcement. I'm just kinda glad one of AFS's 3 big rules is no driving, because I'd have no idea where to start!

Stumbling Blocks

I'm now experiencing my first hurdle. Over the past two days I've developed some sort of stomach bug that has left me extremely exhausted. It's really difficult to describe a sickness in a different language. I've managed to say "stomach ache", but that's not the only symptom I'm experiencing. My host mom and sister think I'm just really sad because I miss my familiy, which I do, but I'm also just sick. I really hope I get over whatever this is soon, because I have to admit it sucks being away from home and sick. Oh well, it can't all be fun and games, right?

When It Rains, It Pours

So I feel a little silly. When asked by practically everyone the typical "How cold is it in Alaska?" question, I've been explaining our lack of extreme cold and mass quantities of rain. However, last night I quickly learned that I hadn't seen how much rain was possible. While over at a friend's house for the evening, a thunderstorm suddenly struck. There was so much rain that the house actually started flooding slightly, which did make me a little nervous. Standing water in a room filled with computers is never a good thing. I'm glad I'm able to say that our house didn't take the same beating Jazmin's house did and in fact stayed quite dry. You don't all have to fear that I'm going to be swept away in a flood though, because I was informed that much rain is quite rare.

Technical Difficulties

So I've discovered that posting pictures takes a long time. It took a good fifteen minutes just for this one picture. It's out of the bus window driving through the streets of Asuncion. I'm kicking it old school in Paraguay with a dial up connection. That's right. It has the whole little song and everything! :) It's okay, it just means I probably won't be able to post as many pictures as I would like. Sorry. I need to take pictures of my house and my family so that I have some to work on posting.

Mi Escuela Nueva

It turns out my fear of school was completely unneccesary. My new school is a lot of fun. It´s definitely different from Sitka High. For instance, I´m with the same 15 or so kids for the whole day and the teachers have to walk around and change classrooms. The level of work ethic also seems to be a lot more relaxed, but it depends somewhat on the teacher. Every hour we have at least a ten minute break to do whatever and sometimes we even get longer.
Lunch is delicious. I had no idea what to expect, but after dishing myself a plate of fresh salad and finding my seat, I discovered a tuperware container with my name on it filled with homemade food. It was pretty awesome. Plus Anahi told me that if there was any food I didn´t like, I could tell the cook and she wouldn´t make it for me again. Definitely different from home! Well, technically I´m writing this from class, so I should probably go, but I have this nagging mother that really wanted me to post something about school :)
I´ll write more when I can!

El Segundo Dia en Ciudad del Este

Today is my first full day with my family with Ciudad del Este. Technically I haven't spent the whole day up and about, as most of it was spent sleeping. Last night Anahi took me to a club where we danced until 5:30 in the morning. It was amazing! I was very surprised that a lot of the music that was played, I knew. Such as The Killers and a little Snow Patrol. However here they have actual DJ's, so it was all mixed together with lots of great bass! I'm having a great time here.

My mom is really nice and loving. Sometimes I can't understand her, but Anahi will jump in and translate when necessary. I'm a little worried what will happen when she leaves on the 21st for France for a year, but hopefully by then my Spanish will have improved. I'm missing everyone a lot, but am also having a blast trying everything new. My new philosophy is to try everything, even if I don't think I'll like it. Last night I had river fish for dinner and it was great (don't worry though, it wasn't farmed!). Tomorrow I'll start school and I'm really nervous, but my Spanish can't get any worse, right?