Montevideo Rambla, Ciudad Vieja. When we arrived here, late 2009, it was rare to see even a single vehicle parked along this stretch of road.
Consumer credit comes to Uruguay! At least that’s one explanation.
Car prices have fallen recently. This may involve poor budgeting by people new to credit, buying cars for only *so much* a month. Perhaps they don’t think about fuel (2.5 times the cost in the USA), maintenance, and insurance. Then enough of them figure out they really can’t afford a car, and try to sell it.
At any rate, it’s distinctly more difficult to find a parking place in Montevideo than a few years ago, to the point that I usually don’t even try, and head to a parking garage instead.
We got on well with Charles and Linda, the photographers from my last post, so I suggested we do the free walking tour of Montevideo, which I’d never done. The weather was forecast yesterday to be lovely, and it was.
The tour begins in Plaza Independencia, site of the fabulously overwrought Palacio Salvo, apparently once the tallest building in South America. Our tour guide, however, told us there’s Palacio Barolo in Buenos Aires, built a few years earlier to the slightly lesser height by the same architect.
I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow, but here were a few noteworthy sightings.
Under “STOP,” someone has stenciled “de comer animales.” Stop eating animals. Optimistic soul: Uruguay has the highest per-capita annual beef consumption in the world.
In the Plaza Matriz or Plaza Constitución (take your pick, as you are welcome to do with Uruguay’s year of independence – maybe 1830 or maybe 1824 or…), street vendors have interesting historical items for sale.
But for North Carolinians Charles and Linda, it was the NC Highway Patrol patch that caught their eye. Is there really a market for this stuff in Montevideo? Apparently.
And then this: Happy arrival in Montevideo, showing a couple falling down marble stairs.
Is there a story behind this, or an inside joke?
Oh yes, and the interesting fence design in Plaza Zabala….
At the Christmas day party of our neighbors, we met a house-sitting couple from North Carolina who happen to be professional videographers with decades of experience, who love stories. And we – particularly my wife, who got caught in the middle of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and who survived a perilous crossing of the Indian Ocean in monsoon season, detailed in her memoirs – have a few.
Charles and Linda came to visit and we set a date and time for a shoot for their One of a Million series. They arrived with what I thought was a lot of equipment, but they insist is just a fraction of it.
They rearranged furniture, set up lights and background (I helped with background lighting, great fun!). Charles did most of the technical work, while Linda prepped Susan for their interaction, with her as off-screen and unheard interviewer.
Charles sets the camera’s white balance to 4100° Kelvin
What’s remarkable is that the end result feels as if it was one take, whereas the final 5-minute video is carefully edited from perhaps an hour of shooting (I lost track of time). They want it to feel like you’re chatting with someone over a cup of coffee.
Decades of experience, and it shows.
Then there was the acoustic environment. The neighbors’ music, playing since 8:30 AM, stopped. It was raining lightly, so there were no weed eaters or lawn mowers. There was almost no traffic on the street. The dogs didn’t bark once the entire time. And the completely obnoxious gas delivery truck with its piercing Führ Elise noise was nowhere to be heard.
As soon as the shooting stopped, the renters next door returned home from wherever. Shortly after, I heard the gas truck in the distance. 24 hours later – today – we would have had a very loud weed eater and lawn mower going next door. With the shotgun condenser mic, maybe background noise would not have mattered. But the lack of it was amazing and wonderful.
Inside it appear what looks like the base of a fan, and a toilet, along with podas. But no visible appliance or fencing from my previous post. So perhaps the people who delivered this container, being more than one and thus able to load those items into the container, did so, and took them away?
If so, a remarkable and encouraging display of initiative – kudos!
Maybe six months ago I wrote to the Intendencia of Canelones (our departamento), who had been putting up lots of signs like this.
“This space is also yours. Take care of it.” Obvious implication being, don’t leave crap here.
Given a ditch in front of my house, and narrow street, where exactly was I supposed to put tree and bush trimmings (podas), I asked? I never received a reply.
However, a month or so ago a large container appeared nearby on the large circular lot, and filled rapidly.
It actually appears in two different places. This was the second.
And here is the first. Apparently they assumed – as did I, for that matter – that it would be obvious the containers were there solely for organic material. Apparently, though, the owner of the washing machine and the guy who dragged overgrown chain link fencing didn’t get the memo. Or maybe they would have been hauled away, had they actually made it into the container instead of being left next to it. Either would have required more than one person to accomplish.
Before the container appeared, I had made substantial and ugly pile of trimmings this side of that little path in the foreground. I made a point of cleaning it all up when the container appeared, even though it was not actually in this spot, but the other, 50 meters away. It was a bit of work, but it was the right thing to do.
Will the people who left this stuff be equally responsible?
I suspect I already know the answer to that question.
Residents of Uruguay can bring in some things duty-free. I think currently it’s three times per year, has to be by courier or Uruguayan Post’s program, and value limited to USD 200, including shipping costs. I used it recently to ship down a refurbished Macintosh keyboard. The day after it arrived my wife’s Macintosh keyboard started to fail as well. So I ordered another for around USD 50, again with some clothing items my wife wanted, keeping under $200 and under 2 kg (courier service charges by the kilo).
The same keyboard new in the US is USD 163 new, which is quite ridiculous. I don’t want a wireless keyboard – not long ago I wired our two computers with ethernet and turned off wifi – but even if I did, what Apple offers, USD 99 in the US, is ridiculous here:
And Apple is “different” enough that anything else I can buy locally will only work with Windows. I tried. Keys all jumbled, regardless of computer language settings.
To get here, the goods had to be shipped to Florida, consolidated, cleared through Customs here, and delivered. Today we discovered the sodden delivery notice in our mailbox:
There is no date. Apparently it was from yesterday, telling me that since nobody was home, we won’t do that UPS/Fedex thing and try again. You have to come to our office (oval: what?) hour on the seventh of January two-thousand-backwards-nine-nineteen.
I went to the DAC office, less than two kilometers away, and was told by a lady with a broom there that I would have to go to Montevideo. I pointed out that we were standing at the intersection of Artigas and Circunvolación, as indicated on the slip. She then went inside and asked the girl, who recognized the name and directed her to a top corner shelf, which she could barely get to through stacks of boxes.
As she did that, I scanned the shelves, immediately spotted the USPS Priority Mail box and retrieved it.
So, another “something actually accomplished” in Uruguay, something that those living in lands of consumer convenience probably can’t even begin to appreciate. And on a further ‘Murkan note, I got a kick out of the receipt: when was the last time you got a receipt with “God bless” handwritten on it?
No doubt the last time you ordered from Saved Computers.
I’m no fan of two-stroke engines, because if you don’t use them regularly they simply don’t start. Sometimes it works to empty the fuel-oil mixture, start and run for a few seconds with straight gasoline. Sometimes, and inevitably messy. “Start chainsaw” has been on my to-do list for weeks now – maybe months – while the thing sat on a big piece of cardboard, oil slowly leaking and soaking through to the baldosa tile floor below. Rather than actually try to start it, yesterday I put it back in its case, and took the oily cardboard to the trash container on the corner.
At the end of our driveway, I noticed trash – what looked like a plastic plate – at the entrance to the culvert under our driveway. I’d seen it a few days before, and decided it should go in the trash too. Can’t put off everything forever.
Removing it and a plastic bag, I saw there was more, and pulled out a mucky shoulder bag, spilling its contents: hypodermic needles, veterinary supplies, and a stethoscope. Then I realized there was a second bag, containing a sodden laptop computer.
My neighbor Álvaro was mowing the lawn, so I showed him all. I figured the vet supplies were useless, except perhaps for the stethoscope. I had no idea what to do with the computer until Álvaro pointed out a sticker on the back. I hosed mud off, let it drain, then headed to Electroshop, our local computer repair store.
The owner quickly spotted a number on their sticker, and identified it as one they had reformatted in 2010 for a Mario Fernández. I was hoping he’d offer to call the owner, but with that offer obviously not forthcoming, asked for details. He thought maybe it was the vet whose shop was a block and a half away.
Indeed it was! His car window had been broken, home gate opened remotely, dogs let loose – and when he heard where I’d left the other bag, was out the door in a flash. By the time I got home, he already had the bag fished out and inventoried, and was talking with Álvaro.
Between pedestrians and passing vehicles, a small crowd gathered, and Mario explained how the vet bag contained controlled substances, including those to sacrificar – put down – animals. Someone asked, and no, he wasn’t worried about data loss; all client data was en la nube – in the cloud.
His wife appeared on foot. They live two blocks away, and I’ve walked past their house many times. She was amazed thieves would discard a computer, as was I. The robbery had occurred a week before, and they had been diligently searching. Sounds like their son was in and out of every garbage container in a five-block radius. Yuck.
After the recent heavy rain, I had wondered why the upstream neighbor’s ditch was overflowing, while ours was flowing normally. So: two mysteries solved.
For a year now I’ve had a calendar from a local pharmacy hanging on my wall next to a window I often leave open a little at night – which occasionally Mocha the dog opens further with his nose. This morning, for the first time I ever, I came downstairs to this:
(the glass bead is one of many our son Jesse made when we lived in Mexico)
Cowbells are from Susan’s time on Cyprus, before the Turks invaded in 1974 and she was evacuated
The calendar, blown off its nail and on the floor. But of course: its time is up. I replaced it.
Only in processing the photo – not taking it – did I notice the gray background designs on the calendar, which last year’s didn’t have.
Given what I’ve been reading and learning lately, makes me wonder how many other things I might be missing that are right in front of me?
Preparation for our first stay – after years – in our little country house involved a couple of trips, to connect gas, fix a few odds and ends. This trip included killing a small wasp nest where we park the car, and bringing back a shovel to bury the dog.
The dog was the smallest of the crowd that bark when we go by with our dogs, and the only aggressive one. Yesterday it turned up dead for no apparent reason, ten meters off the road, right on our path. I took a side trip after the walk to ask the 3XL neighbor about it. No, it wasn’t his but his neighbors; don’t know what happened to it; yes, the owners know about it.
Armed with that knowledge, we had a pretty good idea what would happen next: nothing. Hence the shovel. It would be a quick job as the area is all sand.
Halfway through digging, I looked up to see Syd, who had ridden his bike to see if the corpse was still there, in order to let me know whether I needed the shovel. Not long after a young neighbor wandered over. He’d apparently been thinking he would have to bury this now-fly-infested thing. Syd got a nearby piece of discarded shade cloth (covering an ant’s nest, but hey), grabbed the dog by two legs and dumped it in the hole. The neighbor took the shovel from me and filled it in.
Then it occurred to me that Syd might get a kick out of the rig I improvised to spray spiders in the peak of our bedroom ceiling. He did, and said I should blog about it. So here we are.
Terminator
I don’t remember now why I used wire instead of string.
Probably to intercept less of the liquid coming out. The can is actually slightly offset to avoid spraying directly on the wire.
