Getting a true bargain in the cheapest city on Earth is not as easy as you might think. It all started so well. But later that evening, as I chatted to hordes of partying Paraguayans in a nightspot called the Bambuddha, I told a group about my supposedly thrifty find. At first they were startled. Then they laughed. Within half an hour the news of my empanada had spread through the entire club.
An old man approached me and wordlessly put a hand on my shoulder in sympathy. The barmaids, who until moments ago had happily floated around the floor β with waist-length hair, tight starched shirts and hips that swung like saloon bar doors β stopped to interrogate me.
You've just eaten the most expensive empanada in Paraguay! It's not just cheap. It's smirk-inducingly, caution-capsizingly, restraint-collapsingly cheap. In fact it's officially the cheapest capital city on earth. Mercer Consulting, which compiles an annual list, has placed it as the least expensive city to live in for the fifth year running. Isolation and rampant corruption have made most of his friends flee to Spain or the United States.
But it's not the same if you live here. There is so much corruption in the government. Just go downtown and see how many counterfeit goods you can pick up. We have such a bad reputation for it but nobody's going to stop because we can't afford to buy the real thing. Parks are, incidentally, a great way to slow your pulse to Paraguayan time. The city is littered with immaculate areas of shaded greenery, the best of which is the Plaza de los Heroes. Here lies a reminder of Paraguay's bloody past, when lives were considered as cheap as empanadas are to tourists today.
Complete with resident footsoldiers, it is a shrine to President Francisco Lopez, an admirer of Napoleon who decided to invade Brazil in The bloodshed in the resulting six-year long Triple Alliance War so called as Brazil was backed up by the armies of Argentina and Uruguay cost the lives of a preposterous 80 per cent of Paraguayan men.
