Foz do Iguaçu: Friday

On Thursday night, we departed for Foz do Iguaçu, the fantastic waterfalls located at the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Today (Tuesday) was Brazil's Independence Day, so it was a long weekend. Our bus was 3 hours late; we left at about 11:00 and arrived in Foz around 10:00 Friday morning.

Our hostel was nice and clean, and for the first night we had a 10 person room all to ourselves:

After moving in and making a rough outline of our 4-day plan, we visited the free zoo across the street. I saw my first banana tree (I know this is weird, but I've always wanted to see a banana tree. It's a good goal to have: they are awesome):

While wandering around the zoo, we came across a man cutting down a tree with a machete (he was not intentionally part of the zoo, but he was still interesting to watch). He turned out to be the zoo keeper, and he noticed us watching and showed us around the zoo himself. He even let himself into the animals' cages and took up-close pictures of them. So even though I haven't been this close to alligators, my camera has:

And, he let us hold the baby tortoises.

For the rest of the day, we explored the city. Little expecting any money issues (foreshadowing, Follower!), we even bought some souvenirs at the market, and found kebabs for dinner:

Yum!

When we got back to the hostel, L, the owner, made us drinks and started talking to us. We were pretty much the only guests there that night, so he had plenty of time to chat. The conversation took a sudden turn from "Where have you traveled?" to "Let me tell you about my sexcapades!" L looks young for his 46 years, but certainly not young enough to be dating a 21 year-old or sleeping with 19 year-old clients. To be fair, he also doesn't look old enough for his 72 year-old clients, but he'll sleep with them, too. In fact, L told us, he'd slept with about 1,000 women. His favorites are blonde, blue-eyed Germans. He made us promise to tell him about our dating lives the next night, but we assured him that ours were not half so interesting.

After over an hour of talking, L showed us to our room and brought us some quilts. He pointed to the empty bunk next to ours and asked,

"Do you know who's sleeping here?"

"No..."

"I am!"

We giggled awkwardly and said, "Um, see you tomorrow!" and closed the door firmly behind us.