WELL... like i promised... i'm back with an update of last weekends activities...
Well the trip to Ciudad del Este was a long one and it felt like it would go on forever. I had a great time though... I was sleeping for most of the way and then woke up to this GIGANTIC dairy factory. The ice cream was sooo great there and they had everything that could be made from dairy from ice cream to yogurt to cheese and they all tasted exquisite! The yogurt here is AMAZING you can pretty much drink it... cause its that thin... but it tastes so good and its $0.68 for one bag of it... that's right a bag. They don't sell large amounts of yogurt and milk in big packets... they sell them in bags which you then cut and pour or drink. They also sold yogurt with cereals in a thing on top of the yogurt. Now that was cool. At first, I wasn't so keen on the idea of cereals with yogurt cause i'd tried it before in Canada and it didn't taste good at all... But the yogurt here... WHOLE DIFFERENT STORY (in a good sense).

Our first order of business on arriving at Jeru's sister's house was to go and see the Monumental Lighting of La Represa Itaipu (A Giant Dam, THE biggest in the world). It wasn't the typical light show that we have in BC which draw massive and at times violent crowds. Instead it was simply the lighting up of the damn... as you can see in this picture... It really gave me perspective that night of how huge that dam was. It was a pretty cool experience. In order to see the dam, we had to wait at the reception area while several buses were prepared. I think there was about 15 buses. The huge greyhound kind... not the transit kind. Everyone had to climb in them and they took us to the place where the light show was going to take place. While we were waiting, I made friends with a few guys who were there to keep the peace... If we had these guys at our fireworks. I don't think any of those punks would mess around and cause trouble. Anyways... so it went.. the light show was great.

The next day we headed over to this beautiful biological reserve with all kinds of cool things... "unfortunately" we were not able to take a ride through the forest where there were snakes. Other than that "unfortunate" event, the area was gorgeous! That's a picture of the whole family excluding Jeru's oldest brother and his girlfriend who joined us later that day. Of course lets not forget the beauty of the waterfalls. Gorgeous to say the least, it was like being in a tropical paradise, this is a picture taken by jeru's brother. As you can see... jaw droppingly gorgeous. Later on that day, I got into a go-karting accident. Let me tell you, those brazillian go-karts are by no means slow... and their brakes don't work properly. One guy completed this long track in like 21 seconds... I think the track was about 800-900m, with twists and turns and what have you. This left my left hand screwed up for a while, but it's feeling a lot better today. That was one of the reasons why the last post was so short.
Ohhh and one more thing, everything was free going to the dam on the buses as well as the rides and the biological refuge. In fact, they had little hotels at the biological refuge that were free as well and they weren't crappy either.

I'm off to Argentina this weekend and I hope to update you from there or what I get back. In any case, thanks for reading and as always...

Take it easy...