Author: doug

Christmas Eve

Our first Uruguayan passports, good for five years, were expiring. Arranging to renew them turned out to be relatively easy; done and paid online. When we got to the passport office, though, we lacked our credenciales civicas, which after a trip to the Corte Electoral, turned out to be big pieces of paper we got with our citizenship.

So, the next day we returned with those. No, they were supposed to be renewed after three years. Though an Uruguayan friend told me the credencia civica is nothing more than a voting card, it was indeed required for a passport (which she doesn’t have). The clerk this time had a printed paper we could take to the Corte Electoral, where the same friendly person said no, that’s not here, that’s a block away. So we went a block away, got numbers, and started the process until we got to the address part. We don’t have/can’t invent an address in Montevideo? Then we’ll have to go to the office in our departamento, Canelones. After a nice lunch in a new restaurant (rated #1 in Montevideo), we found the office, and got everything done – until my wife’s fingerprints. They just weren’t sufficient on four or five fingers. So: make appointment with dermatologist, come back with doctor’s note if this can’t be fixed, and we’ll proceed from there.

Booking a doctor appointment online with Asociación Española is also quite easy, but the soonest we could get to a dermatologist was a month away, in Montevideo.

Which is how we ended up there on Christmas Eve. Would there be such a thing as a routine doctor’s appointment on Christmas Eve up north? It somehow strikes me as unlikely.

Anyway, it was a snap. We returned the way we came, which involved me making a left turn at a traffic light which invoked a chorus of blaring horns: yeah, OK, don’t turn left in Montevideo.

Nice lunch at Lo de Mónica, near Géant and Macro Mercado supermarkets, where we spotted this.

I’ve posted many times about Uruguayan handwriting, how 9s look like Ps or lollipops, but this a first: a Y written as a 7.

OK, that’s anticlimactic. So here’s a cool Dodge Power Wagon we then saw in the Géant parking lot.

50-peso surprise

I got change at the butcher today and thought I had been handed a bill from another country. But no – even though it was released three months ago, this is the first one I’ve seen

Uruguay's new 50-peso note

The polymer note is a welcome change from the tatty paper ones, though I’m not so sure the 50th anniversary of yet another Rothschild-controlled central bank is something exactly worth commemorating.

Uruguay's new 50-peso note

And it is light-years better than the coin nobody wants.

You can read more about it here.

Every yard should have one

Uruguay "negro" lawn ornament

Ah, Uruguay! Every day that I walk dogs with Syd, we go by this house. FWIW, only 4% of Uruguayans are black. 

If you’ve been with me a while, you might recall similar remarkable coffee packaging (which El Palacio Del Cafe subsequently changed).

On another note, weather here went from very rainy to very hot. How hot? Just before I took this photo, all six dogs were in the recently filled swimming hole. I don’t remember ever seeing that before

Dogs enjoying a swimming hole

The MoCave

A year ago, Mocha was a tiny little thing.

dog and puppy

As time went on, he decided the little closet niche next to my office chair was a nice hangout. But then he outgrew it.

Except that, today, months later, he demonstrated that he hadn’t:

Maybe it’s because Syd had earlier sent me a video of animal escape artists and he wanted to prove something?

Who knows? Dogs can be wonderfully weird.

Quite a lineup at the drugstore

40+ people lined up to get into a farmácia? That seemed a bit odd. I was on my way to pick up alterations from the modista (seamstress*). 

I asked her why this might be. Turns out this is the first and only pharmacy on the coast licensed to sell marijuana. Aha!

.

* 2 women’s pants extensively altered, torn men’s cargo pants turned into shorts, baggy shirt turned into tapered, all for $700 – USD 21.50.

Time to change water filters

Ya think? New filter cartridges above; the ones below have been in place for all of three months.

A few minutes later, all set to go again. One of the cartridges is supposed to be changed twice a year. No way! Four times a year for each.

You can see water that came out of the tap (more than once) here. Unfortunately, when we had a well hand-drilled shortly after arriving, they stopped when they reached water at 17.5 meters. Had I known better, I would have had them go 10 meters more for potable water, not just irrigation water. Alas, it was done, and to revisit it now would involve removing one of our two avocado trees, and that is not happening.

Language fun

A flier showed up in our mailbox for the new droguería in town. Start with that: droguería translates as “drug store,” so what’s the one thing you would expect a droguería to not sell? Did you say drugs? Congratulations! They sell industrial chemicals, cleaning supplies, garden products, cleaning and beauty supplies…but not drugs. Here’s the flier:

 

advert

Deliveries without charge; that’s nice. But if you’re a native English speaker and your brain shuts down halfway through, you can read it as “deliveries without cargo.”

Worse, if you’ve lived in Uruguay a while, that almost seems right.

I’ve been gradually de-Googling, and was delighted to find an alternative to Google Translate that promised to be good.

 

translation

Alas, that delight was short-lived.

So, forget this – on to something practical: find out if the window people are ever going to measure for a screen, as promised weeks ago. Need their phone number. “Stuck to soccer field 5” seemed like a strange address, so I wondered if I was missing something.

sucked to football

 

Apparently yes. Or at least, someone/thing is missing something.