Asuncion wiki

I've been living here for almost 3 months now. I will leave mid November, before it gets ridiculously hot here.

Where are you from originally?
Why are you in paraguau?
What is the cost of living? i.e rent? beer? food?
How you liking it?
How are the locals towards foreigners?

cheers

how are the women there

1) Holland (Excuse me for my bad English)

2) I'm travelling in South America and try to live in different countries for at leat a few weeks each time.I got interested in Paraguay after reading a book from a Dutch guy who lived in Paraguay for a while, normally not a lot of travelleres visit Paraguay on their travels trough South America.

3) Cost of living really depends on where you live and how you go out, etc.
But in general it's a lot cheaper than Argentina or Brazil for example.
I think Paraguay is one of the cheapest countries in South America (together with Bolivia).Asuncion is always in the top of cheapest cities in the world and in South America,.

I'm renting a unfurnished house ( 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, living room kitchen) with 2 other guys in one of the best areas foor $800/month (excl, water, electricty, phone, internet). Locals tell us we pay to much (we found out that the renters before us paid $600/month). You can live very comfortabely for $1200-2000/month here.

The same goes for food, there are a lot of cheap places (meals for $2-4), but if you want a good steak at a nice restaurant you pay about $10-12.
There are also some Brazilian style Churrasquerias, where you can eat as much as you want for about $10-15 including deserts.

Prices of drinks depend a lot, in the more upscale clubs you can pay up to $2 for a 33cl bottle of Budweiser or Heiniken, in the center there are some places where you can get liter bottles for less than that.

(Real) brand clothes and perfume for example are pretty cheap. The 2nd city of Paraguay, Ciudad del Este, is tax free heaven. A lot of Brazilians and Argentinians come to Paraguay to buy all kinds of stuff.


4) Asuncion is not a pretty city, the center looks a lot like cities in Central America. Flew in from BA, Paraguay has a very different feeling to it than Argentina. There is a huge difference between rich and poor here,for example in the center there is a park where indigenous people camp/demonstrate and you see people selling stuff,making music on the street an in busses but on the other hand one out of every 10 cars seems to be a Mercedes.

Things I like about Asuncion/Paraguay:

- It's quite cheap.
- It's was quite easy for us to get a house (maybe we got lucky), in some other countries it's very hard to just go out and rent a house on your own without using an agency. We saw the house in the clasipar.com.py, went there arranged a price, the next day we signed the contract at the escribania office, paid and got the keys.
- The weather, in the winter the wether is quite nice here and a lot better than in BA. Altough, in the summer (November-February) it gets very hot (tempratures of 40C and above are not an exception).
- Girls.
-Guarani language, I don't understand any of it, but it's pretty cool that about 95% of the population speak (at least some) Guarani. Luckily almost everybody in Asuncion speaks Spanish.

Things I don't like about Asuncion/Paraguay:
- Corruption: one time we got stopped when by the police (while going to a club in a taxi), we had to bribe them ($20) for the 3 of us before they let us go on. They told us we had to got to the police station to check if we were legally in the country, so bribing was the only option if we didn' ant to ruin our evening. This is just one exception, Paraguay is a very corrupt country.
- The city is quite small (altough there live about 2 million people in and around Asuncion). Expect for going to a club, a concert, the cinema, etc there isn't that much to do. After 10PM it get's quite deserted in a lot of places in the city (center).
-Taxis don't drive around, so you either have to all one or go to a taxi stand.



5) People are generally nice, but not as friendly as say in Colombia. This country has lived under a dictatorship for over 30 years, I think this has an influence on the people here (they are a bit more closed), altough you wouldn't notice this a lot as a foreigner. I only had one bad experience, with cab driver, in the 3 months if been here so that's pretty good I guess.

Girls are generally good looking. A lot of the "uperclass" girls have the Argentinian look, but there also girls with a little darker skin color and even some white skinned girls with blue eyes (a small % of the Parguayan population are from German decent).

Is it safe or are there muggings and kidnappings etc?

Hey,

Pics of house?
How hard is to get furnished places? Is it really worth to buy furniture?
Top 3 Crazy stories?
Do you think colombian people are nicer than BsAs people?

so if you're on your own and don't know any spanish are you basically ****ed?

I believe you have stayed in Medellin before. How would you compare the cities?
How reliable is the internet?
Do you need to get a visa before entering the country. How long can you stay?

Seems like it could be a good place to stay during the South American winter particularly now that the Dollar is very weak vs the Colombian Peso

Safe compared to what? Muggings happen all over Latin America. If you just use common sense, I guess the change of getting robbed here is a little bit bigger than in BA, but not a lot. If your an not used to travelling in Latin America or have only been to Argentina I can see you feeling unsafe because of the poverty here, but that's antoher story.

There is a small movement called EPP (something like te FARC in Colombia but smaller), they kidnap people but I don't think they target foreigners, they are not active in Asuncion tough.

My friend got robbed when he was wasted and decided to walk back to a bar in he center to the hostel we where staying at and he got robbed by some kids (they call them pirañas) from the slums by the river, they even took his clothes and shoes lol. Locals tell me that either these kids are homeless or their parents won't let them into the house if they don't bring them money.

1)Try to post some pics of the house later, it's nothing special. The house is probably build in the late 70s build but it's still in good conditions.

2)You can get furnished places but the places I saw on the internet were really overpriced, I visited a furnished appartment for $700/month wich was like a 1/4 of the size of the house we have now. The furniture was pretty cheap, I guess it depends on how long you want to stay and with how many people you are renting. To give you an aidea I bought a new chair for $100 and a new king size bed for $180, a 2nd hand refrigerator we got for $100.
If I would be on my own here I probably would have rented a furnished place and spent a little more beacuse I'm too lazy, but the guys I'm sharing with wanted to do it this way so I safe some money.

In cities like Medellin and BA it is a lot harder to rent something as a foreigner without using a rental agency, here it's a lot more common (even as a foreigner) to rent directly from the owner. Maybe we got lucky but for us it was pretty easy to rent house.

3)What happens in Asuncion stays in Asuncion...
Nothing really crazy happened his far.

4)Hard to say, both are pretty friendly but I think in general Colombia is the country with the friendliest people that I visited.

Yes I stayed 1 month in Medellin. Medellin is a much nicer city (if you stay in El Poblado), Asuncion is smaller and feels a whole lot smaller. In like the landscape, location and climate of Medellin also a lot more than Asuncion, Paraguay has no real mountains. Everything here is a lot cheaper than in and there are not as many foreigners as in Medellin (Not like Colombia is overrun by tourist). Like I said before, Asuncion is not a pretty city.

Internet is pretty reliable (I think on average once a month the connection fails) but not really fast, we have a 3MB plan for $70 but surfing and loading clips on youtube sometimes takes forever, we did some speedtests online and a lot of times it didn't go over 50 kb/s. Downloading with torrents seems the only way to take advantage of the full 3MB.

Citizens from some countries, including the US, need a visa. Citizens from the EU get a 3 onth tourist visa when you enter the country, after the 3 monthss you have to leave the country and reenter for a new 3 month. I think you can do this as many times as you wish (in Colombia yu can only say uptil 6 months out of every calander year if I'm not mistaken).

I don't think you are really going to enjoy yourself if you stay here alone, I got lucky that I met 2 other guys at the hostel I was staying in that also had plans to stay here longer and wanted to rent a house.Expect for some Peace Corps workers, a handful backpackers and some diplomats, there are hardly any tourist/foreigners here and not a lot of people speak foreign languages.

This is the reason I have never gone south of Tijuana.

Is it possible to find a furnished place to rent for a month or two? How do the nice barrios compare to El Poblado in Medellin or Palermo in BA?

Yes it is possible, don't know if it's going to be easy to find something tough.
Try clasipar.

I don't know all the good barrios, but the nice barrios I know do not have a lot of appartement buildings like in Palermo or El Poblado (mostly houses). You can see good houses next to pretty crappy houses, so it's not like in El Poblado wehre almost all the people who life there are "uperclass". In Villa Morra where I life there are some malls, discos and restaurants but it's not like Parque Lleras where all the restaurants and bars are concentrated in one place.

Asuncion has super hot girls. Even though a lot of them leave the country for Argentina, Europe, and Chile, the country is still loaded with hot girls. Thin, all natural, pretty face. If you know spanish and you got cash flow, you may never leave. Its even better for old timers. One girl I was dating with a 9.6 face and 9.9 body was only 20 but admitted dating a 55 year old. And she claimed her best friend was her dad's mistress (a hot 20 year old blonde). The culture is crazy. All the guys have 15 girlfriends and all the girls have 12 boyfriends. Cousins bang each other and stepdads bang their stepdaugthers. The owner of Toc Toc bar is 44 and has at least 5 ninenteen year old 9s at his disposal at all times. Truly sick. I had to leave because I really thought I was going to spend my whole life sleeping and when awake banging 19 year old 9s for the rest of my life. If the devil made his hell on earth, this is what it would look like (blistering hot summers with blistering hot women to corrupt you). Unfortunately, with no spanish, you will not function.

How does a post like this /thread?

Was doing some research on secondary citizenship and stumbled upon this thread. Any current Paraguayan grinders?

I'm in Asuncion again at the moment, but I'm leaving soon for Brazil.

I got my residency visa here now, wich is quite easy to obtain and takes about 3-4 months but you can do all the paperwork in about 1-2 weeks and leave the country and come back when it's ready. The time for obtaining the papers in your home country (police check, birth certificate, etc) is not included in the 3 months.

I used a English speaking lawyer wich I can recommend, he charged me $800 for his services. You can in theory do it all by yourself but it will take longer and is more stressfull.

I think in order to get the secondary citizenship you have to go thru a similar process as you didi for obtaining the residency visa but I'm not sure, the lawyer can you inform you better

This forum is a good source of information for expats living in Paraguay: http://www.expat-blog.com/forum/viewforum.php?id=522
The lawyer I mentioned post in this foum under JFinestra.

It seems that there are more foreigners here now than in 2010 but not that much. Prices have gone up quite a bit since the guarani is getting stronger against the dollar and Euro And it's still very hot here for most of the year.

I haven't been grinding a lot here because I've been busy with the visa, buying a car here and some other stuff. As far as I know, there isn't much of a poker community as there is in BA, Brazil or Medellin. I don't know of any foreign grinders here.

Hey guys i will stay for a few months in Asuncion and was wondering if there are still some pokerplayers around?