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?
This is the ocean. I know, the locals consider a river, despite the fact that the other “side” of it is over 4,000 km away, in Antarctica.
So there’s 4,000+ km of open water that direction, and 6,500 km of open water to Africa.
And those are the only waves?
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 ….