Author: doug

Curious advertising choice

Olivo, short-lived restaurant in Parque del Plata, Uruguay

Couple years ago, a Brazilian chef opened a slightly upscale restaurant in nearby and otherwise not-upscale Parque del Plata. I took the wife to have lunch there once, and next to the sign showing they were open was a very convincing chain holding the gate locked shut. I doubt it’s still open.

I mention it today because I’m trying to clear my desk of little pieces of paper, mostly presupuestos, or estimates which you get every time you ask a price here, and came across this advertising piece for the restaurant.

Why would someone go to the bother and expense of creating these things, using a defective Google map that shows significant residential areas underwater? Boggles the mind. This mind, anyway.

The sausage machine

Inspired by local expats who have started making sausage, but not by their product or prices, the kid decided to make his own, and diligently cranked and cranked and cranked with a neighbor’s manual grinder. Lot of work.

making sausage, Uruguay

So when we found an electric one at Tienda Inglesa, we said why not and shelled out some bonus points. The kid cranked it up, and it worked like a charm!

poor quality appliance, Uruguay

For an hour. Unfortunately, not completely unexpected with products sold here.

The sitzbad

Bath I designed for our country house, Uruguay

Given a bathroom space that didn’t allow for a full-size bath tub, we recalled the sitz bad of my wife’s apartment in Frankfurt. I made a wood model of the seat, and the albeñil Martín went to town. No doubt this will end up as the single most expensive item of construction, but we’ve lived with a place to soak for almost seven years, and will install a solar hot water heater when I get around to buying one.

Of course, there’s always got to be a surprise, and in this case it comes through the semi-Medieval plumbing they do here. The draining water from the bath (this was its first test) goes into that little floor drain, then exits the house. Except that it doesn’t go into that little box; it floods into that little box, under considerable pressure, of course flooding the bathroom if you don’t slow it down. Not a show-stopper, and not unsolvable, and fortunately the floors consist of tile over concrete, so even if it were to flood the adjoining room it would simply be an inconvenience.

What a difference a year makes!

A little over a year ago, we started construction on our remarkable new house. Have a look.
This is what it looks like now:

67c74-house-bedroom-finished
Looking toward the front. This will be a sleeping area.
house-front

Looking from the sleeping toward the back back.

The storeroom on the right replaces the charming defecation facility I photographed in August 2012. All that’s lacking is the kitchen. I plan to build the cabinets, and been waffling and indecisive about how I want to do them. But, as Stuarte Wilde said: There is no hurry on the creative plane, nor is there any lack of opportunity.

Nesting ice trays

I had never seen anything like this before Uruguay. Obviously, the one time (you learn quickly) you stick a full ice tray into the freezer on top of another freshly placed ice tray facing the same way, you end up with a mess.

So why would someone design something so unpleasant for the user?

  1. Can be shipped in one-third the space,
  2. No one is accountable, and
  3. No one but the end user cares.

I know (from experience with other products) that were I to take this to customer service at Tienda Inglesa to point out the user-unfriendly design, the girls there would simply explain to me how to stack them “properly.”

If you live in Uruguay, you have to get used to the idea that there exists very little expectation that goods will be well-designed, well-made, or durable. The amazing thing about these lavender-colored ice trays, however, is that they haven’t broken, and most of the time ice doesn’t stick to them. Unlike the red and blue ones, which yield shattered ice only with a struggle, and tend to break in short order.

Discovering how well they worked (stacked “properly”), I went back to get more. And found only red and blue ones. And have never seen the lavender ones again.