New House

Tomorrow is moving day! We will be leaving our small, cozy hotel suite, and moving to a very large, pretty house. With a yard and swimming pool. And a room for each of us, if we want it. And our own kitchen. I am so excited not to eat another restaurant meal, that I may even cook. I will post pictures of the house as soon as I take some and can get hooked up with internet...

The Missions

We took a nice weekend trip to see the Jesuit ruins in the south of Paraguay and also in Argentina. They were very interesting, I love old, crumbling bits of history, so they were perfect for me. They boys seemed to enjoy them as well.

This picture is of Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana, in Argentina. It was the most ruined of all the sites we visited, the walls were all fallen down or held up with wooden braces. There is also a cemetery that was still being used up until the 1980s.

The next five pictures are of San Ignacio Miní, also in Argentina. The first is a view across the plaza to the church, and the second is a close up of one side of the entry to the church. This was an amazing ruin, there were many outbuildings still standing, and much of the carving in the church was intact. The third picture is of the original floor. The fourth is of carvings over the side door of the church, and the last is carvings along the bottom of the wall.



We spent the night in a cute little cabin in the town of San Ignacio, then got up the next morning and drove back to Paraguay. We visited two ruins in Paraguay, La Santisima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue.

La Santisima Trinidad de Paraná:




Jesús de Tavarangue:


There is a good movie from the mid 1980s called The Mission, starring Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro. It is a fictionalized account about the end of the Jesuit Missions, and the film is beautiful, but depressing. There are some scenes that feature Iguazu Falls, so you get to see the two coolest thing in Paraguay in one film. Marcus, Sam, and Chris watched it after our trip to the missions. I think that the movie helped them see how the people might have lived in the missions, and how they looked before they were abandoned and ruined.

I am going to put all the pictures we took up at Shutterfly, if you want to see all of them, go to: http://sunproductions.shutterfly.com/

Information on the ruins, or Jesuit Reductions, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_Reductions