Being the one who knows how to conjugate verbs and speak complete sentences in Spanish, I went with my son to DNIM’s closest office in Géant, a shopping center not far from the airport, to get the third renewal of his provisional cédula (ID card), permission in hand from the glacially slow office of Migración.

No no no they couldn’t do that, says DNIM, because they needed an apostilled copy of his birth certificate with official translation, and I had to take a letter to the central DNIM office requesting a renewal. A friend wrote the letter, and I took it to the central office, where we went though the whole thing again about the apostilled copy of his birth certificate with official translation, because they only have the scanned translation we paid for the first time, and something about the Registro Civil and some other office of foreign affairs, but she asked for my phone number, wrote it on the letter, and said she’d call.

Which she did Friday evening, saying I needed to go by the central office para notificarse, to be notified of something.

So today I rode the bus into Montevideo, went to their office, and at the third desk was told the request had been authorized, and here’s the number to call at Géant to sort out a time to go there. I did a couple of other piddly things in Montevideo, but basically spent the whole afternoon garnering as much information as could be conveyed in a phone call in thirty seconds. Or an email.

Time is cheap here—as my son learned last summer, when he worked as a cook for a brief period.

*The official name of the country is La República Oriental del Uruguay, which means The Country to the east of the Uruguay (River), which further means that the country does not have a name, but rather a description. Suitably inscrutable.