An endless siesta, and that’s not a good thing

An endless siesta, and that’s not a good thing

HOUSING
Through someone I knew, I found a decent apartment at a very good price. That’s survivorship bias. Looking at the housing market, finding a decent furnished apartment at a reasonable price is practically impossible. “Estate agents” and “fixers” will charge you an arm and a leg for a dump in the middle of nowhere.

SERVICE
Based on my experience with businesses and public-facing services here, the standard is what you’d expect in a small, out-of-the-way provincial town. Work is done poorly, costs a lot and comes with plenty of mistakes. I keep getting overcharged in shops. When you point out problems, they make a half-hearted attempt to fix them. The only places that seem to work more or less properly are branches of big chains like Starbucks.

Government offices are hell on earth. If your case gets stuck at some stage of a procedure, nobody cares. Every attempt to get something moving ends with: “There’s nothing we can do. Just wait.” A doctor gave me the wrong diagnosis without ordering the necessary tests or an ultrasound. Deliveries arrive as a mangled mess about 30% of the time.

QUALITY OF LIFE
When the exchange rate was around 7,800–8,000 guaraníes, life felt cheap and the problems were easier to forgive. At 5,800, though, there’s only so much you can put up with.

I keep coming across spoiled food in chain supermarkets, and you only discover it after opening the packaging. In just one month, I bought mouldy cheese, mouldy bread and oats with bugs that could only have got into the packet during production.

Getting the internet to work is an adventure in itself. In six months, I went to a Tigo service centre five times to request a technician. Each time, they came and fixed it, only for the connection to stop working again a while later. Even paying the internet bill only works about half the time.

PEOPLE
People are kind, helpful and warm. There are good and bad sides to life here, though. On weekends and holidays, music can blast across the entire block from the evening until 3 a.m. The neighbours living right around the source don’t seem to care. Nobody calls the police, apparently because there’s no point. Requests to turn it down are ignored.

If you can afford to have everything taken care of for you and live somewhere soundproofed, you can manage. Otherwise, you’re constantly putting up with carelessness and indifference.

Edited translation · Русский