Author: doug
Tero-tero!
A pair of territorial Southern Lapwings, or tero-teros as they’re called here after their raucous call, have created this “nest“ near our tajamar, and, given their aggressive nature, have staked their claim for a significantly larger area. I was able to get close to take this picture (they’re the size of very small chicken eggs) without them dive-bombing me.
When the young hatch, that will not be the case.
A new blue travel document
Today was the day. By the fourth passport, they got my wife’s right. Mine only took two tries. The name thing: Spanish names include two first names and two last names, father’s and mother’s, and these do not change. It’s a very consistent, and sensible, system.
Unless you’re a gringo. We each had one where they got the name wrong. My wife’s first they screwed up (she got a guy who is fluent in English; that’s how he expressed it), then she managed to sign hers outside the allotted area, which nullified another. Then the name thing.
When she finally got hers, we were more than ready to get out of there, and though we thought it odd they gave her a second one with the corner clipped, we just threw it in the envelope and skedaddled. When she finally looked at it—back home—she realized it belonged to someone else. Someone else with five years remaining on his US visa. He would want that passport!
My first thought was to send an email to the passport office. But the form on their web site doesn’t work. The phone number given is 152 and an extension. Of course (as with our mutualista), everyone’s supposed to know you add a 2 before it if you’re not in Montevideo. When I remembered that, I got someone who told me to call back in the morning when the office was open.
I hung up and within five seconds the phone rang. It was someone else from the office, asking if I had the stranger’s passport. I asked what I should do. She said she’d call me back in five minutes.
Its owner lives relatively nearby, and will come to our house tomorrow morning to collect it.
Had a chuckle pondering the likelihood of such a casual resolution happening in the U.S….
Carpet of lavendar
Sort of like June 1…
…except that it’s December.
The season officially starts in two weeks, at which point I’ll have to take the dog to the beach first thing in the morning, or not at all.
Maybe they’re migrating?
I walk dog/s most days.
In over four years in Uruguay, I’ve never seen an abandoned soccer ball on the side of the road.
So today…
…OK, OK, you’re thinking, he’s going to say that today he saw an abandoned soccer ball on the side of the road.
Wrong!
Two.
Thanksgiving edition
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
Termites
Today it was gas-bombing the casita (little house) for termites in the roof. Yesterday it was cleaning the grasera (grease trap) which was overflowing, which smells (probably) like spilled and broken human guts. My son gagged. I had to complete the task on my own.
Inscrutable Oriental* Bureaucracy
Being the one who knows how to conjugate verbs and speak complete sentences in Spanish, I went with my son to DNIM’s closest office in Géant, a shopping center not far from the airport, to get the third renewal of his provisional cédula (ID card), permission in hand from the glacially slow office of Migración.
No no no they couldn’t do that, says DNIM, because they needed an apostilled copy of his birth certificate with official translation, and I had to take a letter to the central DNIM office requesting a renewal. A friend wrote the letter, and I took it to the central office, where we went though the whole thing again about the apostilled copy of his birth certificate with official translation, because they only have the scanned translation we paid for the first time, and something about the Registro Civil and some other office of foreign affairs, but she asked for my phone number, wrote it on the letter, and said she’d call.
Which she did Friday evening, saying I needed to go by the central office para notificarse, to be notified of something.
So today I rode the bus into Montevideo, went to their office, and at the third desk was told the request had been authorized, and here’s the number to call at Géant to sort out a time to go there. I did a couple of other piddly things in Montevideo, but basically spent the whole afternoon garnering as much information as could be conveyed in a phone call in thirty seconds. Or an email.
Time is cheap here—as my son learned last summer, when he worked as a cook for a brief period.
*The official name of the country is La República Oriental del Uruguay, which means The Country to the east of the Uruguay (River), which further means that the country does not have a name, but rather a description. Suitably inscrutable.
Still smoldering
Far as I can tell, all the houses near this fire remain completely unoccupied (seasonal). My best guess is the gardeners who maintain the yards dumped the trimmings there, lit them on fire, and left.
Fortunately, there’s little chance of it spreading, and aside from an occasional thatch roof, little in the way of structures that are flammable.