An inquisitive old fart with a camera
Products, services, marketing, names
Taking up valuable space in our luggage back from ‘Murka: cotton tea towels that absorb moisture. Kitchen scouring sponges that don’t begin to disintegrate immediately with use.
I know. I can hear you already: why would you want those?
Early yesterday morning, I found myself with coffee at McDonald’s at MVD – Montevideo airport – near this receptacle for “mixed waste” and “recyclable materials.”
The “mixed waste” graphic caught my eye.
What’s this? Your McDonald’s hamburger will be so bad you’ll throw it out half-eaten? Or worse, it’s so bad that the hamburger itself is vomiting?
I guess in a country of 3.5 million people you’re not going to get the cream of the crop when it comes to graphic design. Or it may be that someone has a really really good sense of humor.
I like the latter idea.
For a country that considers itself non-religious, Semana Santa – oh, sorry, Semana de Turismo – is a big deal. That’s Easter Week in case you’re still not up to speed 😉
Duly noted, of course, in my calendar:
Fortunately we had nothing of particular importance to accomplish this week. Our friends Sandy and Don, whom we just left at the airport for their move back north, were kicking themselves that they didn’t factor Semana de Turismo into their planning, but almost everything that needed doing got done regardless.
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
A little security company mini-minivan pulled partway into our driveway and beeped the horn. When I went out front, the driver got out, leaving two (three?) people sitting in the car.
He was offering a security special of free installation something yadda yadda. I told him we had lived here almost ten years with dogs and no security company, and that the only problem we’d had during that time was the alarms of our absentee neighbors’ systems going off at all hours for no apparent reason.
Still, I asked him about what they had. And whether they were local.
No, not local, he said, but they have detectors with cameras, and when they pick up a signal, an operator checks the camera and calls the police if things look suspicious. I asked enough more to determine that dogs and cat would set off the alarm continuously, and his solution for that was to keep the animals in a segregated part of the house, and … ¡chau! Mr Security Man.
Though of course the idea of giving complete strangers the ability to activate cameras inside my house at any time … how could one not feel warm and fuzzy and secureabout that?
This will be a little obscure to someone who hasn’t actually suffered through daily life in Acodike’s Uruguay. Gas for cooking (“Supergas”) comes in metal gas bottles sold by many vendors. All have phone numbers, and will bring gas on demand for a slight charge. And of course everyone has a cell phone, so anyone can phone anytime, anywhere, and have replacement gas within a few minutes.
However, one company thinks we still live in the 1990s, and has its drivers – apparently on commission, based on their wasteful repetition and overlap – drive back and forth endlessly, with a tinny and piercing version of Beethoven’s Für Elise screeching at high volume. Yes, the ice cream truck “music,” but not tempting you once a day. No, just driving up and back every street, occasionally turning the noise off abruptly, which makes it no less jarring. Not every truck is the same, and I’ve heard as many as three different ones in the space of a couple of hours.
Everyone (above a certain level of awareness, with the bar set pretty low) hates them. But they just persist with their noise pollution, because es lo que hay – that’s how it is.
Today – blissfully! – we have reached the afternoon without their intrusion. From being an acoustic hell the last few days, Uruguay suddenly seems like a nice place to live again.
One of those old emails that was just too good to get rid of. (So, yes: out of the trash and onto the blog 😉
On Mar 18, 2018, at 12:03 PM, Notification <creditagricolebank@yandex.com> wrote:
ATTN:
It is about your inheritance payment here in our Credit Agricole Bank of Egypt,
somebody call Mr. Allen Roland Jr came to claim your inheritance fund this
morning and said that you authorized him to claim the fund and that he is
your new Next of Kin.
He has provided the whole documentation as to prove that he is your next
of kin, the fund so the fund is yet to be transfer to his account. So that
is the reason why we contacted you to find out whether you are still alive
because he said to us that you are dead yesterday.
Reply to this email below ASAP
Email: kolazakicreditagricolebanking@gmail.com
Mr. Kola Zaki
Administrator Department
Regards,
Mrs. Daina Williams
Form: Secretary Officer
Credit Agricole Bank of Egypt.
Re: Attention
To: kolazakicreditagricolebanking@gmail.com
Yes, this is to confirm that I am dead yesterday.
First, this incredibly pompous and self-righteous hilarity:
And why trust us? Because no one tells us what to write. Because they don’t have to. Because we already know what they want us to say.
Meanwhile, shopping for a travel accessory on Mercado Libre:
Needless to say, I ordered it immediately.
A little over a month ago, I began drinking sparkling water (agua con gas) instead of wine.
I love the vastly reduced clink-clank of bottle recycling, and the cash savings will certainly buy a little sushi, but I didn’t feel good about the single-use plastic water bottles from the supermarket. Given tightening purity standards in China for recyclables, many municipalities up north have gone from making a little selling recyclables, to paying much more to send them to a landfill.
I don’t know the status here. I don’t know if plastic is really recycled, and if so, where (but they seemed serious about it last I checked, seven years ago). But then I remembered how we got drinking water before I installed filters: the water guy who comes around every Monday morning.
He brings pressurized bottles like the one on the left. Total waste is reduced from a bottle with three types of plastic, to a little piece of plastic wrap. Plus the water stays fizzier because the bottle is pressurized. Also it costs less. And the delivery guy is friendly and helpful. For example, after starting delivery only a few weeks ago, we were out last Monday morning. We returned to find six bottles of water at our doorstep, to be paid this week, no problem.
So how many times can these pressurized bottles be re-used? I have no idea. However, this is one delivered today:
Notice the phone number. Phone numbers in Uruguay no longer begin with zero. In fact, they haven’t since late 2010. So, chances are these bottles have been around a while.
I like that.
We haven’t gone out for ice cream this summer, and Syd mentioned vanilla with walnuts and maple syrup, and seeing as we had the latter two ingredients – and the weather being insufferably hot – I procured the former.
I think it’s been eight years since I used the ice cream scoop we purchased here. It was a piece of crap then, and now, even on ice cream fresh from the store, it was even more a piece of crap:
Yes, digging into relatively soft ice cream it bent completely back. Instead of going back to the drawer, it now goes to the trash.
This is, unfortunately, all too typical of products purchased in Uruguay. We discovered this early on, of course. However, as a followup, I’m happy to say that those new garden tools mentioned in that 2012 blog post are still going strong – I used them both today!
