PAUL, Palermo - Buenos Aires

pauldeco.com
Gorriti 4865, Palermo - Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires has so many beautiful shops and boutiques, espacaly in the Palermo and San Telmo district. So I decided to post a selection of my personal highlights and start with PAUL.
PAUL Franch Gallery is a beautiful home decor shop in the middle of Palermo. They sell furniture, decoration articles, soaps, wine, cloths, accessories and other things you just easily fall in love with. Just a nice place to get some inspiration!

Granja El Roble (11.04.2014 - 15.04.2014)

www.paraguay.ch

In Belen, 20km east of Concepcion lies the Granja El Roble. Run by Peter from Germany together with his Paraguayan wife and their three kids. Besides some chickens, pigs & cows from his earlier days as a milk producer Peter has giant fish ponds for Tilapia, Surubí & Pacu. But the main income are the cabañas, the restaurant and the entrance to his little zoo. By word of mouth it came to be known that he has a heart for discarded pets and hurt animals, so they end up in his place. When we visited him he had a blind Anaconda (probably run over), a discarded howler monkey (became too aggressive), different parrots and doves, a Screamer bird (evil creature), a Toucan and best of all a Tapir as his guests!

A stay at El Roble is always full board, meaning three meals a day which you eat together with the family on one long table. You can relax in the garden, in the pool or one of the hammocks. You can gaze at the fish in their aquariums or in the koi pond. Play with the various pets or follow the Tapir around the house. In the morning they drive the kids to school, so you can tag along and have a look around Concepcion. We visited the tiny (and rund down) museum, which nevertheless welcomed us heartily and showed us around, free of charge. 

The main "attraction" is Peter itself. After twenty years in Paraguay he has always a tale to tell or a documentary (about the country or in which he helped/participated) to show off. 

From Concepcion leaves a boat once a week to plough up north with the possibility to cross into Brazil later. Since having heard of this opportunity we (okok, I) wanted to take this route. Sadly the catholic nature of latin america made this impossible, on new years eve and easter the boat doesn't run =/

So we headed north-east by bus to the border of Brazil, wanting to reach Bonito...

LOVE IT!

Wallpapers of the World - Ciudad Bolivar

Another two-tone-wall, this time in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela.

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Asuncion & Concepcion (08.04.2014 - 11.04.2014)

To enter Paraguay we had to cross through Brazil again. We hopped of the bus at the border control in Ciudad del Este and got our entry stamp. To get some Guaranis, the paraguayan currency, we entered one of the many shopping malls in Ciudad del Este. It is the least valuable currency in the Americas with one million valuing around 200CHF, but Guarani is also an indigenous and official language in Paraguay which kids lern at school.
Walking past the shopping window I couldn't help but notice the low prices for the GoPro Hero3+, which I planned to buy for my next trip... Not much later I was the proud owner of one of these little wonders! Super excited!
We had an enjoyable six hour ride to the capital as our bus was of the big sleeper chairs type.
In Asuncion the next day we strolled through town, snapped pictures of the presidential palace and city hall and had a gigantic picada. A picada is a platter with assorted cheese, meets, sausages, olives & etcetera. We would call it "es Plättli" back home ;)
Heading north to Concepcion we caught a bus which ventured into the Chaco before turning east again.
Paraguay is split into two pieces by the Rio Paraguay with East Paraguay on the eastern shore and the Chaco on the western side. Where the eastern part is densely inhibited and developed the west is sparsely populated, mainly by indigenous groups, and difficult to access. Over this semi-arid land Paraguay and Bolivia fought a bloody war in 1932 which cost more than hundred thousand lives and was "won" by Paraguay two years later.
Our accommodation in Concepcion was the totally run down and dirty Hotel Center, so we where glad when we got picked up the next day to head to Granja El Roble!

Stellarium - Planetarium for your computer

stellarium.org

When we visited the star gazing facility in Chile, our guide showed us different views of the sky above us with Stellarium.
This is a free and open source application, available for all mayor platforms (Windows, Mac & Linux) and in dozens of languages which enables you to travel in space and time to have a look at the stars.

By entering a location you can see what kind of stars to expect, which constellations are visible & much more. You can see in real time how satellites pass and stars wander or hurry it up by pressing fast forward.
But you can also travel back and forward in time. Want to know which kind of stars are visible on the 17. of April 2017 in Reykjavik, Iceland? Or on the 1. of July in 1394 in Lae, Papua New Guinea? No problem!

The application can of course much more than most of us will ever need. There are many differen plugins and scripts available, from following the path of the sund during the year, demonstrating lunar eclipses, displaying Super Novas to sending digital commands to your telescope tracker.

All in all it is a beautiful piece of software which everybody with a slight interest in the world above us should at least try. Its free, so nothing to lose ;)

View from Concepcion with enabled constellation lines, labels and artwork.