We were recently the recipients of a couple of bottles of excellent Swiss white wine (thanks Syd and Gundy!), a Humagne Blanche (fascinating: according to Wikipedia, “the total Swiss plantations of the variety in 2009 stood at 30 hectares (74 acres).” And a bottle ofAigle les Murailles. Both excellent, and mostly unknown outside of Switzerland.
These bottles had corks. I generally do not rue the transition to screw tops for wine, though I admit I don’t completely understand the ecological implications.
So, translate to Uruguay (and notice this has only been a recent issue): a nice Stagnari Chardonnay, produced maybe 45 km (28 miles) away, accompanied by Camembert and blue cheese. Sounds good, eh?
Sorry for the ill-exposed photo 🙁
Well, yeah, except for one thing: can’t unscrew the top because it doesn’t separate from the part below. Hence, we have now as Essential Kitchen Equipment a pair of needle-nosed pliers to tear the top off in, inevitably, a half-dozen or more pieces.
Q: How do you say quality control in Latin America?
A: ¿Qué?
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?
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.
Mars retrograde – source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_retrograde_motion
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:
I’ve picked on Uruguayan websites a couple times in the past, starting with the need to actually type “www” to get to a web site. Redirects are so 1990s-new.
Now it’s all about secure connections. So of course amusing to try to get to web site of Uruguayan Customs:
I was talking with a woman in the feria (street market) yesterday, who wanted to know where I was from and what I thought of Uruguay. It’s very tranquilo, she said, a common theme and indeed what made the country so attractive to us, especially after the noise and chaos of Mexico.
But there’s a flip side to that tranqui attitude, which is a lack of situational awareness. People block the entrance and exit of the supermarket as they stop to chat, completely unaware of anyone else; drivers at speed follow the car before them at a distance of 1/2 second, guaranteeing catastrophe should anything unexpected occur; pedestrians step into the street and then look to see if there might be approaching traffic.
And I don’t know if this is uniquely Uruguayan — I can imagine it’s more a Latin American thing — there are the supermarket aisles. More than once I’ve tempted to tap the shoulder of a Tienda Inglesa employee stocking shelves, and point out that if they moved their shopping cart just 20 cm this way they could block the entire aisle, instead of just 75% of it. But alas, sarcasm is not a thing here.
Here’s a recent gem.
A store employee has lost interest in stocking shelves, and despite the wide aisles of Tienda Inglesa (unlike Disco), manages to leave the shopping cart in exactly the place where it can maximally obstruct traffic. The fact that the store was relatively empty at the time might have influenced this “thinking.”
But more likely, there was simply no thinking at all. Just wandered off to some other task, or mate break, or ….
Shortly after we moved here, the cleaning lady walked by as I was having a couple of fried eggs or breakfast. “Oh, you Americans and your eggs!” she commented.
Which is kind of strange if you’ve spent any time in Uruguay. Here’s the famous chivito:
And here’s an Uruguayan hamburger (the white stuff isn’t mayonnaise):
So it’s fair to say Uruguayans don’t have a problem with fried eggs.
It was the most amazing rabbit chase to date. And seeing as we’ve had a rabbit bounce off our legs and escape at a 90° angle (honest!), that’s saying something.
We were in an open area, with woods about 50 meters ahead, when suddenly one of the dogs burst out of the woods, chasing a young rabbit straight down the path towards us. Had the dog been Benji or Jordan, the rabbit would already be dead, but the dog chasing it wasn’t one of the faster ones.
And the little rabbit wasn’t fast at all.
From Pinterest, source unknown
Syd and I immediately stood on the path in the way of the dog and shouted. No time to think, but with the other dogs behind us, in a completely open area, the little rabbit was seconds away from being torn to shreds.
But then something amazing happened.
We didn’t scare the dog, which continued running. But the rabbit abruptly turned around and ran (as fast as it could, but not real fast) straight back on the trail it had just come down, into the woods. All by itself.
Dogs? No, they were running furiously in the opposite direction. They made a wide arc onto the sand road nearby and reversed direction, and it looked like they still had a good chance to intercept the rabbit.
And then they were running everywhere – could the rabbit possibly escape?
Yes.
Which gave an amazing chase a particularly happy ending.
We were walking in an area of shrubs, dogs lingering behind. Suddenly a YIP! from Jordie, and I swing around to see him flushing a rabbit to the right across the path behind us. But there’s Kiya, and the rabbit abruptly turns right, on the path, toward us, Kiya barely a length behind. Not good. I instinctively place my feet wide on the path, to force the dog to detour, if only for a split second.
BAM! The rabbit bounces off the inside of my right leg. I spin my head around. Syd has turned halfway around to the right and BAM! it bounces off the outside of his right leg. This carom serves to change its course 90 degrees, and instantly it’s gone into the brush.
And then even more amazing — the five “chaser” dogs completely miss it, and go charging up the path ahead. Only Leah, the princess who prefers watching chases to participating in them, spots the rabbit’s real path, and takes off into the bushes after it. Secondslater it’s obvious the rabbit has escaped, which comes (happily) as no surprise.
And then the other dogs, who had chased ahead on the path, reappear from behind. Go figure.
Running Hare Drawing by Malcolm Tait, Saatchi Art (click for source)
Syd has recounted several times the occasion when a flushed rabbit ran out of the bushes and through his legs, but never before contact, much less such a perfectly set up carom that the rabbit-hunting dogs completely missed.
During our time walking dogs together, there have been two kills, bring the total over all the years Syd has walked there to maybe seven. The first occurred at the end of the walk. A young rabbit bolted when five dogs were within a few meters, and didn’t stand a chance. Benji proudly came away with fresh blood on his back, having rolled on it. The second, recently, involved a longer chase, from which all of the dogs returned except Benji. Finally he emerged from the bushes with a dead rabbit in his mouth (no way of knowing who actually caught it). My immediate feeling was that I was looking at a classical painting.
I don’t recall having seen one, so I set out to look, and found this.
Sir Edwin Landseer — interesting guy: click for story
But that dog, except for its size, looks surprisingly like Leah, the non-rabbit-hunter. Go figure.
We don’t do anything special for Christmas (except attend our neighbors’ lovely afternoon food fest). I mentioned to my wife that she normally hangs red ornaments on our ficus tree, at least. She reminded me we have a fast-growing puppy who probably find them great fun to attack. Good point.
We’re also not Jewish.
But in the country we came from, bagels are ubiquitous, and in Uruguay they’re nonexistent. Well, except for one place in Montevideo owned by an American. There’s a place called Donut Shop that advertises bagels but makes — well, you decide.
So she asked the food processor and bread-object specialist (that would be me), to make bagels.
Obviously I’m low on the learning curve, but they were delicious with cream cheese, smoked salmon,1 organic tomatoes and red onions.
Plus, always a treat in Uruguay, the taste made us feel we were somewhere else, somewhere one has a choice of tastes. Restaurants are gradually getting better here, offering variety. One nearby puts the old Uruguayan standbys like chivitos and milanesas under the heading, “Lo de Siempre,” the ‘always available’ stuff. I take that as a good sign. But I can still have fun tormenting recent North American arrivals by asking them what’s their favorite Thai restaurant in Uruguay.2
1 unfortunately from Chile, but that’s all we’ve got
Generally, I try to keep things here upbeat. But walking daily in a sprawling area whose owner or owners are unknown, that is sometimes difficult.
Consider this: from one day to another, a dumped load of furniture and windows appears in the middle of nowhere.
They could have left all of this near a trash container. They could have left some of it near a recycling container. Instead they just dump it carelessly. In fact, I would argue contemptuously, since they managed to smash at least one of the windows.
It’s not a spot where other stuff has been dumped. There are several of those. No, just a new, random location.
Update — per Syd comment. I took a marker with me on our walk today. The person who did this might pass by again, might not. But anyone who does will read it:
“Left by a human pig.” Play on ser humano, which means “human being.”
