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100 reasons not to live in Uruguay

Obnoxious Acodike locations in Uruguay

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.


The inheritance confirmation

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.

 

Spotted on the intertoobz

First, this incredibly pompous and self-righteous hilarity:

bullshit mainstream media

We tell you what to think. You can pretend it’s your own idea.

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:

opiniones

Needless to say, I ordered it immediately.

 

Reduce, re-use: yes; recycle: no

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:

refillable water bottle, Uruguay

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.

The scoop

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!

Startcoin, stopped

A few years ago I started paying around with cryptocurrencies. I’m not sure what got me onto Startcoin, but it was probably during a particularly frothy period where a gimmicky 20-something took to YouTube to present himself as an expert and this was The. Next. Great. Thing.

Some time ago, an exchange warned me to move my holdings to my own wallet, since they were delisting it for lack of activity. Duly noted – recent global 24 trading volume USD 2:


Think that’s bad?

Think that’s bad? Here’s the most recent 24 hour trade data:

Of course if there’s no trading, no nothing, it’s kind of hard to connect with the network to update. This was a few days ago:

This is today:

I’m almost half way there! How exciting! Maybe when I’m up to date, I can transfer my few dollars worth of Startcoin to one of the two exchanges that still list it (why?):

Then I can place an order to dump my stake and watch the price dive – a true market influencer? I doubt I’ll ever get there. Still, it’s fun to watch. Of the thousands of cryptocurrencies, 95% or more will follow this trajectory into complete worthlessness.

By the way, this “investment” was not with real money – I long since recouped my capital in fiat currency. This is playing with froth.

Currency value decline a.k.a. inflation

I stopped by the butcher to get menudos (giblets) and corazón (beef heart) for the dogs. To my surprise, prices had jumped significantly from the last time I looked at a receipt a couple weeks ago:

receipt

That’s a 25% and 10% increase respectively.

Same thing at Tienda Inglesa:

receipt

Mushrooms have gone up 22% in the last two weeks.

In our little local store, the price of eggs has gone up 8% in the last two weeks.

This is not a case of higher prices for tourist season. All of the price hikes have happened in the last week or two, as tourist season ends. And the USD exchange rate has been steady for the last several months (although the highest since we’ve lived here).

I don’t pay attention to too many prices, although I do recall when we first moved here, our son liked to order entrecot (boneless ribeye steak) at Don Vito. It cost 245 pesos, which seemed expensive – at least compared to what we ordered. Here’s where we are with that at the moment:

menu

Granted, it’s been almost ten years, so that’s not entirely unexpected. I remember being appalled when red peppers hit 99 pesos/kilo. Now you’re lucky if the price gets that low. And of course produce varies with the season.

But all these significant price jumps in a very short time, given my expectation of 10-12% per year, have definitely got my attention.

The business card

When we first moved here, we found an older tapicero – upholsterer – to redo a bunch of used furniture we had purchased. We haven’t needed work done since, but I don’t that guy is still working, and I do think about it from time to time.

So when I saw a guy in the feria for the second time advertising his services, I thought it might be a good idea to ask for a business card. Which I did. This is what I got:

No card, no name. Just “TAPICERO.”

Which reminded one of the calendar I got from one of the other vendors a few weeks ago:

It hangs above my computer monitor, with retrograde Mercury and shoulder dates highlighted just in case I get a sudden and unexplained urge to buy electronics when I shouldn’t.

But noteworthy is “J&E” – they have a business name? Who knew? And if I told you the name, would you be able to find them in the feria? Maybe by the blue color of the truck in the photo?

No, instead they’re the cheese truck on the school end opposite the produce stand on the school end, as opposed to the middle-aged couple cheese truck a half block further, across from the produce stand where they usually wear maroon jackets.

That’s the extent of “branding” in the Uruguay feria.

There was a seed and nut stand memorably named 8 Búhos (8 owls) which appeared in Atlántida a couple of times. Since they were new, I asked if they planned to be there regularly. Always, they replied.

You guessed it: they’ve never been back.