An inquisitive old fart with a camera
Alvero has retrieved the refrigerator from a block away. Did he not anticipate people would leave things in it? Were the failed Macintosh keyboards offensive? Or did someone else leave something really offensive?
I suspect the latter, but don’t expect to find out soon. I glanced through our Union Vecinal Whatsapp group but saw no mention.
Why don’t I ask, you wonder. I guess that would be because I find it potentially interesting, but also kind of so what?
Voting in Uruguay: you take your credenciál into a school classroom where there are three election workers at a desk and a soldier with an automatic weapon looking at his cell phone. You put your card down in little taped rectangle (thank you COVEEEEED), pull down the obligatory face mask for ID, take an envelope and let them write down the number, go behind a screened-off area where you find tables full of ballots, find the one you want and seal it in the envelope, go back out, tear off the identifying part of the envelope and hand in, then get your proof of voting (which is obligatory for citizens).
How do you figure out who vote for, and what do these ballots with dozens of names mean? That’s for another day.
PS this guy didn’t win
An extraordinary number of critter tracks, unlike I’ve ever seen.
And unfortunately, something I have seen before: despite the outstanding trash collection here, someone thinks it’s a good idea to haul a bright orange plastic bag full of trash into the middle of nowhere.
The garbage collectors used to have to jump off the truck and retrieve each house’s trash individually — lots of running around! So at Christmas time, they made a lot of noise to attract tips. For several years, though, there has been no individual trash pickup. We carry it to a bin on the corner. But, as you can hear, the seasonal noise hasn’t stopped.
You have a presumably broken fan/heater. No point in keeping it. So carry it past trash containers, hundreds of meters from any house, nowhere near other garbage. Then break it an leave it there.
Absolutely no idea what goes on inside the heads of people like this.
Since it’s been a while, I’ll give you a little cheatsheet: review the various Uruguayan handwriting numeric reversals and inversions.
Now, quickly, read this:
Did you immediately say, Thursday, August 29th at 10 AM?
Of course you did – congratulations!
Our first Uruguayan passports, good for five years, were expiring. Arranging to renew them turned out to be relatively easy; done and paid online. When we got to the passport office, though, we lacked our credenciales civicas, which after a trip to the Corte Electoral, turned out to be big pieces of paper we got with our citizenship.
So, the next day we returned with those. No, they were supposed to be renewed after three years. Though an Uruguayan friend told me the credencia civica is nothing more than a voting card, it was indeed required for a passport (which she doesn’t have). The clerk this time had a printed paper we could take to the Corte Electoral, where the same friendly person said no, that’s not here, that’s a block away. So we went a block away, got numbers, and started the process until we got to the address part. We don’t have/can’t invent an address in Montevideo? Then we’ll have to go to the office in our departamento, Canelones. After a nice lunch in a new restaurant (rated #1 in Montevideo), we found the office, and got everything done – until my wife’s fingerprints. They just weren’t sufficient on four or five fingers. So: make appointment with dermatologist, come back with doctor’s note if this can’t be fixed, and we’ll proceed from there.
Booking a doctor appointment online with Asociación Española is also quite easy, but the soonest we could get to a dermatologist was a month away, in Montevideo.
Which is how we ended up there on Christmas Eve. Would there be such a thing as a routine doctor’s appointment on Christmas Eve up north? It somehow strikes me as unlikely.
Anyway, it was a snap. We returned the way we came, which involved me making a left turn at a traffic light which invoked a chorus of blaring horns: yeah, OK, don’t turn left in Montevideo.
Nice lunch at Lo de Mónica, near Géant and Macro Mercado supermarkets, where we spotted this.
I’ve posted many times about Uruguayan handwriting, how 9s look like Ps or lollipops, but this a first: a Y written as a 7.
OK, that’s anticlimactic. So here’s a cool Dodge Power Wagon we then saw in the Géant parking lot.
If you’ve followed this blog a while, you’ll know that I am fascinated by the mysterious Uruguayan handwriting.
To be honest, I thought by now I’d pretty much seen it all. The 9s, the 4s. The number 1 is commonly written here more like an upside-down V: I’m used to that.
But how exactly did someone come to habitually write it like a backwards L?
Life is full of mysteries ….
Three or four times a year, an astronomical event occurs that I’ve learned to take seriously: Mercury going retrograde, meaning it appears to reverse its course for three weeks.
It’s not because of the astronomical aspect, but the astrological. It’s a good time to make plans, but NOT arrange them, a good time NOT to buy anything mechanical or electronic, to be prepared for all kinds of communications snafus, on and on. And good luck if you sign a contract without reading the fine print five times. Here’s more.
In the early 2000s, I had two distinct related experiences.In one case, I had been on the phone with customers all week, but Thursday afternoon, all of a sudden I might a well have been speaking Urdu: communication simply ceased as conversation continued. Sure enough, Mercury had gone retrograde.
I had become frustrated with the limitations of my Macintosh, poring over the monstrous Computer Shopper magazine every month. One day I said to myself, just pick up the phone and order a PC! No sooner had I picked up the phone than I put it down again, checked online, and sure enough, Mercury had just gone retrograde. The purchase would most likely have been a disaster.
Similarly, friends here suddenly felt compelled to plan a holiday in Europe during the last retrograde Mercury period (22 March – 15 April). I warned them, but they were thrilled how easily all the plans fell together. Less thrilled when the plans started falling apart within a few days: rail strikes in France coincided with their bookings to and from Switzerland, and to add injury to insult, they were only able to get a 65% refund. Then airline strikes in Latin and America loomed, and Air France strikes threatened the flights they had booked in lieu of train tickets. Alas, all seems to be going well for them now.
Anyway, also ignoring my own advice, I purchased a mattress online during retrograde Mercury. It arrived two days later, and we struggled up the spiral staircase with it, started to remove the plastic, only to realize it was not what we ordered. And in fact, an un-flippable “pillow” mattress that we specifically did not want. The man who we phoned at the vendor’s showed absolutely no interest in finding a solution. Finally I reached a woman there, after seeing that a flete to return it would cost 1,500 pesos (USD 50+). She helpfully connected me with their flete operators, who quoted me 650 pesos. Mercado Libre was now involved, and assured me that the flete expense would be reimbursed. I wasn’t so sure.
The nice couple with their miniature van showed, strapped the mattress on the roof, and drove it back to Montevideo between rain showers. They assured me I didn’t need to pay, since it wasn’t my fault. So far, so good! I was a little concerned by the almost complete illegibility of the receipt they left.
But it worked! A few days later, they showed up again, mattress strapped to the roof. And – drum roll please – again not the mattress we ordered! Knowing my wife didn’t speak much Spanish, the woman called the vendor, and hung up rolling her eyes. The “no help” man wanted her to convince us to accept the wrong mattress.
Finally, a month after the purchase, we did get a complete refund (less $17 exchange rate loss; the USD had gained in the meantime) with the help of Mercado Libre.
So, I hope I’ve caught your attention. Next occurrences of retrograde Mercury:
You can easily find them online.