Paying bills

How to pay bills in Uruguay:

Electric, water, telephone:

Set up automatic debit through your Banco Republica account in pesos.
Forget to fund the account one month, at which point automatic-debit contracts cease.
Go to individual offices, take a number, wait – nah.
Take bills to supermarket, pay at cashier when you check out.

Property and vehicle taxes:

Go online, enter property ID numbers, transfer money from bank account.
Or, spend an hour or more in a dreary government building

where the main entertainment consists of guessing how many thousands of people have rubbed against the concrete columns painted flat white a dozen years ago, in order to make them so filthy looking.

That, or staring blankly with the ‘waiting is our second national sport’ look of resignation.

In some regions, like swanky Punta del Este (nya nana na na na!) they have only the latter choice since their departamento lacks an online payment system.

And then there’s Abitab.

You can pay bills at the ubiquitous Abitab, buy concert tickets, wire money, and probably a half dozen other things, but since paying all our bills there for six months yielded not a single ‘Abi’ on my points card, I had decided Abitab was the last resort, refuge of computer illiterates and credit-less souls.

Once our son was set up in Gato Dumas in Montevideo in March, the school gave us a sheet with payment options – bank transfers through three banks, or Abitab. Since any in-person dealings at the bank have the same tenor as the government building above, and being wary of an online transfer (because what a nightmare undoing a mistake!), I went to Abitab, expecting a blank stare, and lackluster and/or indifferent service, and a struggle.

What a surprise: school name, student name and ID number, tap tap tap and up comes the total, late fee included (oops: duly noted): fast, friendly, professional.

Who’d a thunk?

Abitab, Uruguay

Yes, Virginia, there is no paradise.

Uruguay may once again prove to live up to its official motto of “liberty or death.” Already considered one of the freest countries in the world in terms of economic and political liberties, the Uruguayan government has agreed on draft legislation that will legalize possession and cultivation of marijuana for personal consumption.

Meanwhile, prisons in Uruguay are at almost double their capacity, resulting in (politically motivated?) riots and fires recently.

In other news yesterday.

Firewood was delivered yesterday, but the people never showed to clean the chimney.

Mid-morning, our son’s friend arrived at the door quite agitated. The night before another friend drunkenly refused his offer of a couch, instead climbing on his motorcycle to head home. He’s alive, but parked in the hospital for a while with two broken ribs, ruptured spleen, head injuries and perhaps a broken foot. Apparently there was no contact with another vehicle. His is the motorcycle I fixed a few days ago.

By late afternoon, it was clear our dying 18 year old cat Zeus was nearing the end, so we took him to the vet to be put down. As soon as we got back, I buried the body, wrapped in newspaper and still warm, in the front yard near where he used to hang out. I say near because sometimes we’d see him lying in the middle of the street, which didn’t seem a good place to bury him.

45 minutes later our dinner guests arrived.

Rejas redux

Anticipating our first delivery of firewood (a ton of red eucalyptus), I took a couple of the rejas to our local metal guy Daniel. A few spot welds later, I can stack firewood (leña) without fear of blocking the only electrical outlet (tres en linea) in the carport – vast improvement over the rickety wooden frame I used previously.

Whenever the firewood gets around to arriving, that is.

In Spanish, esperar means to wait, and to expect, and also to hope. To a northern North American, that seems hopelessly imprecise. To someone in Uruguay who ordered firewood two days ago for delivery today, its level of precision seems about right.

LATER THAT SAME DAY 😉

Eucalyptus colorado, Uruguay

Enchufar: to plug in

A) Inclinado – B Tres-en-linea (three in line) – C) Schuko (German)

Buy three appliances in Uruguay, and you may get three different types of plug.

If you do some of your own wiring, note that a mounting frame D from Argentina will not work with sockets from Uruguay (A & B), and vice versa. The width discrepancy amounts to a millimeter or less – way to go, guys! And (of course) Argentinian hardware is not widely sold in Uruguay. We bought our house from someone who built it with (cheaper) hardware he carried from Buenos Aires, which is why I know.

I like the compact tres-en-linea, especially with hot leads partially insulated (plug B). I have cut off perfectly good Schuko plugs and rewired new appliances right out of the box.

Other people prefer fumbling with adapters. Here’s one that will accept anything, including North American plugs:

But the question remains – what’s on the other end that plugs into the wall?

Feeling a little stressed out?

Actually not, come to think of it.

Motorcycle repair

The plastic zip ties that held the battery in place on my son’s friend Mauro’s motorcycle were failing. He asked me if I had some he could use, and I sort of did, sort of didn’t, but in any case he clearly had no idea how to rig them as the previous person had. Nor did I.

I noted a mount for an obviously-missing bracket, from the back of the car grabbed some wood I had just salvaged from a friend’s remodeling project, cut a chunk, drilled a hole, put in a screw, and voilá!

The wood appeared to be made to order. Mauro laughed delightedly – imagine that, a gringo showing an Uruguayan how to fix things with nothing!

Rejas.

We bought our house, unfinished, from a couple in Buenos Aires who built it for a dozen years, finally splitting before they had a chance to live in it. Because of their distance (3 hours) and big-city mindset, they had the whole place swathed in rejas – bars, even going so far as to have two locks on every door.

The discordance of the bars with the width of the custom-made wooden window panes gnaws at me aesthetically.

Worse (or better), many houses in our neighborhood have identical windows – and no rejas. Do we need them at all?

Envisioning a solar convection heater for our chilly upstairs bathroom, I borrowed a grinder yesterday and removed the bars from one bathroom window. And then the other. And then two over non-opening windows high in our stairwell. Each is held in place by a tack weld on the head of four lag bolts. Lots of noise and sparks, but in fact relatively little cutting before the bolt will unscrew.

I’m tempted to keep going – the kitchen (above) would be so much nicer without the prison feel. But isn’t it foolish to remove a security feature?

Or is it foolish to live with prison bars because of another person’s fears?

This is a coincidence. Surely.

It took me a while to figure out that something was wrong.

Tienda Inglesa has another promo/giveaway going on. These tend to be semi-annual events, which involve filling out endless dozens of ‘raffle tickets’ with the same information. After a couple years of this, I splurged on a rubber stamp.

Name? Address? Document number? Telephone? Ka-chunk.

Back from the store, along with groceries, my wife unloads a tacky little Disney sticker book, El Mundo Magical, and little envelopes which have to be torn open (what a waste of paper!) to find stickers that need to be peeled (waste of paper!) and stuck in the right place. Glitzy little tacky shit.

Meanwhile, I am locked and loaded for a barrage of raffle tickets, but my rubber stamp sits silent. Don’t tell me….

I expect the next ‘event’ will be around Christmas. Hopefully, we’ll be back to normal, and my ‘automatic 911’ will be just the ticket.

Back from Argentina

No trip report because who cares. Me: back spasms, I presume from hours at a lovely outdoor cafe with slanting floor. Also fever, aching shoulder. Am I getting old and crotchety? The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson come to mind: The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home…. Bodywork this afternoon will helpfully cure all.

Back home, first an hour or two sleep to fill in the cracks from the night before at the dreary and overpriced Hotel Suiza in Neuva Helvecia, near Colonia. (But we had a lovely dinner with an ever-entertaining friend, so all’s good, except for my Tripadvisor report ;-)) Second priority: walk the dogs to the beach.

En route, watched an individual on motorbike pull up to a two-meter wrought-iron fence and put something in the mailbox, ignoring the huge black dog, jumping and barking inches away, reminding more of Cerberus than something that might be put on a leash and expected to play in the sand without killing every quadruped within 500 meters. But then I expect most of these crazy caged dogs become wiggling tail-waggers when free to sniff and circle.

Anyway: The utility companies, preferring their own messengers, deliver bills outside the aegis of the Correo (postal service). Which reminds that back north, putting unstamped mail in a USPS mailbox is illegal, though in fact the US Post Office could apparently not care less.