An inquisitive old fart with a camera
Products, services, marketing, names
Ah, Uruguay! Every day that I walk dogs with Syd, we go by this house. FWIW, only 4% of Uruguayans are black.
If you’ve been with me a while, you might recall similar remarkable coffee packaging (which El Palacio Del Cafe subsequently changed).
On another note, weather here went from very rainy to very hot. How hot? Just before I took this photo, all six dogs were in the recently filled swimming hole. I don’t remember ever seeing that before
40+ people lined up to get into a farmácia? That seemed a bit odd. I was on my way to pick up alterations from the modista (seamstress*).
I asked her why this might be. Turns out this is the first and only pharmacy on the coast licensed to sell marijuana. Aha!
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* 2 women’s pants extensively altered, torn men’s cargo pants turned into shorts, baggy shirt turned into tapered, all for $700 – USD 21.50.
It took us three consecutive day trips to Montevideo to get our Uruguayan passports renewed (actually to get our Credenciales Cívicas updated, a process gratuitously complexified by various functionaries in different government offices) – but we’re now good for ten years, yay! The latter two days involved lunch at new places: Lisandro, offering a variety of sandwiches and salads, but better yet, a peaceful location in crazy Carrasco, and Estrecho, similar fare but better, on Sarandí, the busy walking street in Ciudad Vieja. (Fun to note that Lisandro’s web site offers the address of their other location in Zonamerica as “Driving Rage,” which could, in this country, well be a Freudian slip.)
Yesterday, in Estrecho, the waitress gave us tourist map.
At first glance, it seemed promising.
But then I looked closer.
I guess the idea is you find a bike and make your way, maze-like, through this circuit that just kinda looks like it was laid out to accommodate the sponsoring restaurants and stores. Since we were recently in the area, I looked closer and quickly found a couple that gave addresses nowhere near their Carrasco locations.
On the flip side, this:
Postage-stamp sized listings of exactly 100 businesses, with details in 6-point type.
In terms of design, it’s attractive, and not particularly informative. It might be interesting to follow some of these routes, but I find nothing compelling about them. Nor would I settle on any of the sponsoring restaurants without learning more about them.
In the end, though, it’s got maps. And I love maps!
The brakes on my bike had gotten bad enough that stopping without putting shoes on pavement was no longer a sure thing. (You will, by the way, often see Uruguayans braking bikes and even motos using that method.) So I rode it in the wilting heat this morning to the little bike shop for them to do their magic. Bicycle repair really does seem like magic to me, especially after I try to do it.
I then walked to Tienda Inglesa, where a cashier last night has shortchanged me 20 pesos. I thought something was wrong, but the mathematical part of my brain seemed to be on vacation. When I got home, I confirmed it. 20 pesos is maybe $0.60, but there are lots of new hires for summer in Tienda Inglesa, and it bothered me that the cashier had not counted the money up – at least not the small stuff – the way I’m sure they’re required to do.
Was she lazy? Incompetent? Perhaps skimming a coin here and there? I can’t speak to the first two, but long story short, at the end of her shift she counted 20 pesos more in her till than she should have, and all was duly noted by Tienda Inglesa, and promptly given to me after the requisite recording and my signing in a spiral notebook.
I was impressed.
Back to the bike shop, a pad had been replaced, brakes now threatening to throw me over the handlebars. For a total of 50 pesos, or $1.50. Which made me wonder when was the last time in my native country one could have had something like this done for $1.50 – the 1960s?
I was surprised to buy something the other day and see the label in Russian.
And what was the product (don’t look at the pictures – oh wait, you just did)?
An outside vent cover. Interesting to note that the email address uses commas instead of periods. And the upper right is in German, but missing an umlaut: Der Grüne Punkt,” a European network of industry-funded systems for recycling the packaging materials of consumer goods.”
Hard to imagine what exactly this product did to win a gold medal at an industry trade fair. At any rate, remains a rarity to find a consumer product from Russia in Uruguay.
Easy enough to explain: a clothes vendor in the feria, or outdoor market, transporting the whole setup. Still, a bit disconcerting.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted Quadruple bypass on a bun, amazed that such an excessively unhealthy thing could exist, even in Uruguay, home of the chivito. The other day, riding the bus back from Montevideo, I spotted this:
Curious, I went back to the Burger King site to see what this monstrosity might be. I found no “Ultra Whopper,” but there’s the same photo:
To refresh your memory, on the product page there is a link to “nutrition information,” consisting of
To add to your gastric distress, perhaps you’d also like artificial chocolate goop or acrylamides via potatoes fried in “vegetable” oil.
But wait, there’s a punchline here, in the last line: Frente a H. Clinicas. So after scarfing down all this “good stuff,” you may not even need an ambulance: they can just roll you on a stretcher across the street to this grim monstrosity,
Today we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary a couple days late, after trying to resolve an import issue which I will probably write about tomorrow, in the furrows of Latin American bureaucracy. It was a very reasonable (~USD 25 each) gourmet lunch at Alquimista, #1 of Montevideo restaurants according to tripadvisor.com.
Exiting, I noticed this unique take on parallel parking nearby. Carrasco (which I’ve talked about here and here) is visually appealing, upscale, and in general hell for parking. And, lovely as it appears, maybe one would want to think twice about living in an expensive neighborhood where electrical fencing is commonplace.
And then there’s the supermarket Géant, where store display are ingeniously engineered to prevent passage of customers. But then, they also have the FILO shopping cart system. It’s not my position to label them idiots, but, given a label-maker….
Shopping for most things in Uruguay is not fun, given prices, lack of selection and quality, and not-quite-ready-for-first-world business practices. But recently, shopping for tile, at least I found a title amusement in these ceramic tile displays.
OK, the English-sign thing. That’s definitely got appeal. Of course they’re missing out by not including possessive apostrophes, but ta.
I don’t see how ceramic versions of old American license plates would find a place in too many design schemes. But then again I’m often surprised at the limits of my imagination.
Which brings me to what I bought for the terrace above our dining room, in an atempt to solve the moisture/mold problems below. I found a great deal on these 50cm (almost 20″) square tiles: good albedo for summer heat deflection, nice texture. The kid at the store (at a certain age, almost everyone is a kid) advised I should take my 24 square meters in two loads of about 300 kg (660 lbs) each, given my vehicle.
The first trip went swimmingly. On the second trip, I decided I should stop at Tienda Inglesa to stock up on wine, which involved a turn to the right up a ramp. As with the first trip, the tiles were vertical in the back, leaning to the right.
Kar-umpph! Load shift to the left! I did my shopping, then carefully re-leaned the tiles, noticing that happily, few had broken, and with them just corners.
Getting off the Ruta Interbalnearia, I realized we were short on cardboard, still necessary for fire-starting (it’s been a few weeks since this happened) and provision for night time puppy “accidents.” So I pulled slightly off the road, which involved a slight incline, and kar-umpph! This time the fall wasn’t quite as drastic, seeing as it was limited by ten bottles of wine – ten because that’s what fits into a very sturdy bag we have, gift from a friend in Mexico.
And – sorry if this disappoints you – the story does NOT continue with my ruing the odor of alcohol replacing (what’s left of) our new-car smell. No bottles broke, and though significantly more tiles suffered breakage, overall it’s not as bad as you might have imagined.
And there is – at least was – plenty more where it came from.
Three months ago, I told about our original kitchen stove and attempt to buy a new one on Mercado Libre. That experience was so ridiculous that I abandoned the idea for a while. Yesterday I looked online again, found one I liked, asked if they actually had it (yes), ordered. Their confirmation included instructions on picking it up, which I didn’t want to do. So I sent an email yesterday evening after office hours with no expectation of a reply, but pretty quickly got a reply with delivery cost (USD 17). I replied saying yes please, here’s my delivery and contact info. This morning found a message from the seller from 8:00 last night: OK, we’ll deliver it tomorrow afternoon.
At 3:40 this afternoon, a phone call from the driver; he’s in El Pinar and will be here in 20 minutes. I try to explain how to get here, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested. Though easy to find, our house somehow eludes many delivery people, so I tell him I’ll stand out in front. Couple minutes before 4:00, I stand at the end of the driveway, and almost immediately a little nondescript truck appears from the opposite direction I expect, but no matter. Driver gives me a thumbs-up, I reply, very pleasant guy unloads the stove and delivers it to our kitchen on a hand truck. Beautiful!
It would be lovely to say I just connected gas and electric and ¡ta! But no. I decided to replace the plastic gas tubing, so rode a few blocks on my bike to the closest ferretería for that. Then discovered that the gas line nipple on the stove was slightly smaller than that of the garafa (13 kg propane tank), and the previous stove. The screw clamp wouldn’t tighten enough to seal it. Dug around in my collection of plumbing detritus, and found a clamp marginally smaller that, fully opened, barely fit over the tubing. Slathered a little silicon adhesive on the nipple por las dudas (just in case: “for the doubts”) and plugged in the electric …
… oh shit. The electric cord has a Shuko plug. I don’t have an adaptor, and don’t want to replace the plug because of warranty concerns. Oh but wait! Digging around in my electrical detritus, I find an Argentine Shuko socket to match our house installations! Find appropriate circuit breaker, pull out components, only to discover that the plastic frame that holds the plugs is broken beyond hope. Go to the nearby electrical shop, ask for a 3-socket frame plus one Shuko socket (which takes up two) and a filler cap, and the kid brings out a complete unit with one Shuko socket. Brilliant!
Presently, I have gas and electric up and running – uh, no. There’s no gas. Thinking the gas tank is low, I change it. Then, thinking my repair of the switch pin of the regulator (involving a small rusty nail) didn’t cut the muster, I replace it with one from our defunct barbecue grill – which, having being exposed to the weather for a while, exudes rusty water and doesn’t work any better. Ack! Now past 6:00 PM, I race to the hardware store again to buy a new regulator. Happily, they’re open until 6:30.
New regulator installed, nada.
Then the “D’oh!” moment. What if you had the on/off positions of the little cryptic plastic garafa-regulator switch reversed in your mind?
TL;DR (LOL): time to take dinner out of the oven.