Family and friends were visited; delicious food was consumed, and life in the easy, breezy United States of America was seen from a Paraguayan lens. And while I wasn't seeking answers or comparisons, some simple observations were hard to avoid.
1. Options! While I spend so many days complaining due to lack of options here, I was completely overwhelmed by the array of stores, brands, styles, colors of any and everything. You don't have to eat just the meal of the day; you can choose from this 300 item menu that can be adapted to your dietary needs AND served on your favorite color plate if you want! After stuttering and sweating through each selection process, it left me feeling like I just wanted to sink back into a cave and eat the meal of the day...
2. Convenience and comfort! Oh how I miss my car! I absolutely loved being able to drive, to go anywhere at anytime, to know exactly where to go to efficiently get exactly what I want. I loved taking lots of nice showers, being clean, doing laundry. So many of these conveniences make life so much safer, cleaner, less frustrating but the line does have to be drawn on what is useful and what is excessive.
3. Technology! So much everywhere you look! In the race for advancement and technology, so many things were created, people trying to "do." It now seems that people are trying to undo what they overdid... Trying to get back to the basics so that people, instead of computers, can have jobs, and they can eat clean food rather than processed packaged chemical-filled mush, and have kids that aren't fat, lazy and spoiled all the meanwhile trying to compensate for the harm done to Mother Nature through a new "green" routine and hybrid car. Sometimes medicines have their side effects... Come down to Paraguay where life hasn't been as much tinkered with.
After my trip to the US, I felt even more confirmed that my two worlds live at two ends of the spectrum, and the realities of each can be incredibly shocking. But when I look through pictures from my trip home, I see the same things that I see in my pictures of Paraguay - beautiful scenery, people I love, and weird things I want to show to someone else :)
I'll leave you with one of each.
