(See prior entry for Part 1)
My travel ordeal from 9/11 was complete and I slept through much of that day. My plan had been to get out and see Asunción but lack of sleep and hunger took over. Besides, as I didn’t have my luggage and didn’t know whether it would arrive, one of my priorities was finding a few basic clothing essentials in case I was going to make my presentation the next day in jeans.
After lunch at the hotel, I walked outside where some workers were erecting a large sign for the conference. They were showing me as the second headliner. The top dog was Alvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia. I suppose he deserved to have his photo over mine
I walked across the street to the local mall to buy a clean shirt and underwear. (Something about the idea of talking to 700 people in suits while wearing three day old underwear didn’t have the right appeal.) What can you say about a mall? They’re pretty much the same all over the world in both developed and developing countries. That’s both comforting to a wayward traveler and a bit disturbing as we continue to lose our national identities. Was that Benetton store I just walked by the one in the Rosebank Mall near Johannesburg? No, remember I’m in Asunción today and it’s the Shopping del Sol mall. How could I forget? There’s Burger King in the corner. Maybe I can get some good Paraguayan food there.
Underwear and socks, no problem. I picked those up at a completely forgettable store but now I wanted a nice shirt so the conference attendees wouldn’t think I walked to Paraguay. I walked the corridors of Shopping del Sol mall looking for the right kind of store. Then I saw the words “Christian Dior”, the store name, “Giorgio Patrino” and most important, “Liquadacion” plastered all over the windows and underneath “40%, 50%, 60%” – my kind of place.
Like most high-end stores around the world, the well-dressed staff looked me over as I entered and saw a downtrodden mess of a man and I could tell they were considering asking me to leave. But my quick gringo response to the salesman’s query, “solomente buscando” gave me away as someone who might have a wallet stacked with credit cards, so he gave me the run of the store and I soon found the fancy shirt section. After a few minutes, I found a nice Italian shirt in my size. I looked for the price and there was none on the shirt, always a bad sign. So I asked the ever-watchful sales man for the price. He looked at me, looked down at the shirt, smiled and said 819,000 guarani. Now that sounds like a fortune in guarani but a quick calculation told me it was about $190, in my world, a fortune to pay for a shirt.
So, I looked at him, looked at the shirt and said, “muy, muy, caro!” He shrugged.
I pointed to the store windows at all the Liquadación signs and cleverly said, “es imposible que el precio es correcto; es mas barrato in los estados unidos; es mas barrato en Italia” Although, frankly, I had no idea what the shirt would cost in Italy but clearly, he could see that he was dealing with one tough hombre. So he took out his calculator and gave me a new price, “645,000 guarani.”
I shook my head and said, “todavia mas caro.”
He went to work again on his calculator, looked back at the store manager who nodded at him and, after a moment, he offered, “385,000 guarani.”
Maybe I could have gotten him down further but he had dropped his price by more than half, so I said okay and the shirt was mine for $90. He seemed like a beaten man, although the manager was smiling behind him. I left content but thinking that this exchange could have taken place almost anywhere in the world.
I returned to my hotel to work on my presentation. As numero 2, I wanted to be good and I had been asked to speak for 90 minutes, something I had done once before but it’s a lot of work to keep the masses entertained for that long. What preoccupied my mind though was what Karin had said to me during our drive to Asuncion when I asked how they were going to get me out of the country as I was there illegally without a visa. She said, “there may be a bribe involved.” I began to wonder what life inside a Paraguayan prison might be like.
Later that day, I met some of the officials of the Paraguayan Trade Fairs organization. One told me he was a good friend of Paraguay’s Vice President and assured me that I wouldn’t have to pay the maximum fine, which I learned was $6,000. “I’m sure we can get you out for no more than $1,000.” Good thing I got that shirt for half off.
The conference and my presentation the next day will be covered in later blog posts. However, the organization was very professional and my session was well attended. I had started to think about looking like Steve Jobs up on the stage wearing jeans but Karin showed up the previous night with my suitcase, so I looked pretty much like every other suit in the place, only I had a headset mike and earpiece so the simultaneous translator could tell me to slow down or repeat a sentence.
The following day, I had scheduled a lunch with a cabinet minister in Chile, a meeting that I didn’t want to miss. I looked to see if I could get to Buenos Aires the night after my presentation so that I wouldn’t miss my morning flight to Santiago but the last flight out of Asunción was too early for me to make it. The next morning, I was scheduled for a 6:00 am flight to BA and then the short flight over the Andes to Santiago but that meant I would have to leave the hotel at 4:00 am to go through customs and make my flight.
I had dinner that night with the owners of Paraguayan Trade Fairs. The same gentleman who told me about paying the fine sat next to me but said nothing about my visa. However, he was genial, interested in my speech from earlier in the day and well-traveled. He said something to me about the region that I think encapsulates some of the culture of the countries in the southern cone region of South America, “Paraguay looks at Argentina and Brazil; Argentina looks at itself and Chile looks at the world.” I find all three countries to be a bit provincial but Chile is certainly the least so and the one that has built a strong economy based on global exports.
Years ago, on a Scandinavian trip, I heard an expression about that region which goes, “The Finns design a product; the Swedes build it; and the Danes sell it to the Norwegians.” These are generalizations but there is a little bit of truth in them that describes their national character.
At 4:00 am the next morning, I was bright eyed and bushy tailed (as much as one can be with four hours sleep) at the hotel when Karin, her husband and 18 month old son pulled up to take me to the airport and get me out of the country without a jail term. This couple deserved a medal for how they took care of me, although as my local travel agents, they felt some responsibility for not ensuring that I knew about the visa.
Karin asked me how much money I was carrying. I told her a couple hundred dollars and a little more in euros. “Forget the euros,” she said. I was trying to as I acquired them when the euro was about 20% higher.
When we got to the airport, she walked with me right past the security entrance to go through customs. There was a guard there but he didn’t bother to ask for our tickets or passports but ahead of us was the usual lineup of customs agents sitting in boxes stamping passports and asking probing questions about travelers’ visits.
I waited in line for our turn, not knowing what Karin had in mind. She pointed toward the end of the row and said, “See the guy in the last booth?” I nodded “That’s our man,” she said. Now, I knew some sort of fix was in but had no idea how it would turn out. When we got to the head of the line and it was our turn, we walked over to our “hombre elegido”.
Karin asked for my passport, handed it to him and commenced a rapid negotiation in hushed tones. She seemed irritated at what he was asking for. I thought about my newly honed negotiation skills buying a shirt two days earlier and was about to offer some suggestions when I heard a stamp come down on my passport like a hammer. She took my arm, walked me to the side and asked, “Could you give me $60?” I pulled a couple hundred dollars out of my wallet and began counting twenties. She pushed my hands down so that no one from customs would see. I gave her the bills and she directed me toward the x-ray machines. I lingered for a moment wondering if I was to watch her buy my way out but she motioned for me to leave.
Thus ended my trip to Paraguay. Smuggled in and bribed out, a first and hopefully, a last for me. The flights to Buenos Aires and then to Santiago were non-eventful except for the incredible views of the Andes. I made it to my lunch meeting in time.
On the whole, it was a pretty interesting adventure, although one loss was that I never got time to see Asunción. Perhaps, though, my introduction to the wonderful hospitality of the Paraguayans made up for that.
One final coda to the trip was that from the time I got off my flight in Santiago until I walked into my hotel in the city about 15 miles away took about an hour. It was the kind of efficiency one sees in places like Zurich and wishes for in London. The contrast to my trek to get into Paraguay was evident and I thought again about the direction these countries face and the way they are developing themselves.
Tags: Americans, Assumptions, Asuncion, Chile, Governments, Mistakes, Negotiation, Outcomes, Paraguay, Situation Analysis
