At the central plaza, a big digital clock showed also the temperature: forty-four Celsius. It was enough to explain the obvious evaporation of the nearby Paraguay River; the town was literally steaming. It was my first visit to Asuncion and after dropping my luggage in the hotel, I was ready for lunch.
Fearing my blood would boil out if I began wandering around and being too picky, I entered the Lido Bar, a restaurant at one of the central plaza corners. Inside it wasn’t much cooler, but the place looked attractive. It had a square bar at its centre – where most customers sat – and a few seats squeezed along the walls. It was an active place, and that is always a good testimony for such a place.
I sat by the bar and a waitress promptly gave me a menu. The first meal in a new country is always a special occasion and I wanted to make the best out of it. The first item that caught my attention was the “Sopa Paraguaya,” – Paraguayan soup. Good, it was ethnic enough for a first meal. But I had another reason for choosing it; drinking a hot soup when the temperature outside threatened to spoil the thermometers had an intrinsic humorous value. It was the ultimate confrontation between Human Will and Nature. Earlier, in Xian, I had seen Chinese people enjoying ice-cream at temperatures of minus nine Celsius. Would the opposite situation be enjoyable? Without stopping to ask what did the name mean, I ordered my soup.
“Excuse me, you gave me a fork,” I said to the waitress.
“What did you order?” she asked with a frown.
“Sopa Paraguaya.”
“It’s OK,” she said and disappeared with a curious smile on her lips.
Being open to foreign customs has been a major lesson of my trips; but what was I supposed to do with a fork and a soup? Chopsticks would be more useful, but mine were within my luggage. Instead of merely fighting Nature, I would now need to confront some very weird local customs. It was time to be brave.
While trying to summon out my courage, the waitress approached me with what seemed to be a piece of over-dense sponge cake and put it in front of me.
“Excuse me, I asked for a Paraguayan Soup.”
“That’s it,” she said smiling that smile again.
In Paraguay and Bolivia, the word soup is sometimes used to design dishes prepared by boiling out the water used in its preparation. Sopa Paraguaya is a cake prepared with corn flour; it costs less than one dollar.