Category: Wheels

The flete

Anticipating holiday guests, a friend asked me to arrange transport (a flete) for her stuff, filling the guest space, to another friend’s shipping container in the country. With a local reference, I produced a hard-working driver with an ancient truck that did not inspire confidence.

flete1

But it worked just fine. The second of two trips. Truck: 1954 Commer.

Consumer goods in Uruguay tend to be shoddy, so bringing decent things when you move here makes sense. Linens and towels. Clothing. Hand tools, even comfortable chairs and a couch. Still, I marvel (sometimes poetically) at the quantity of stuff people feel the need to import.

Or perhaps I should say, feel the need to possess.

flete4

The 40′ container is now perhaps 60% full. Of unused stuff.

Guy on a pink bike. Big deal.


It’s so common to see a man riding a woman’s bike, or a teenage boy riding his little sister’s pink bike, that I forget how threatening that would seem to a young male’s ‘manliness’ in the USA.

As with the need for punctuality, unlimited consumer choices, and total convenience, much of the message for stressed northerners living in Uruguay comes down to three words.

Get over it.

Put on your best foreign accent and repeat after me: Life is to be livid!

 

Tosca

Tosca:

  • an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini
  • the same magically transposed to film in a stirring and wonderfully performed production featuring Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna asthe star-crossed lovers
  • a downtempo-chillout-electronic-trip-hop lounge duo
  • a fine Italian dining experience in the heart of Washington, D.C.
  • an awesome old school café in San Francisco’s Chinatown
  • a manufacturer of travel goods in Australia
  • a street in Singapore, and …

… dirt. Actually a type of crumbly rock (my scant knowledge of geology fails me), a mountain of which appeared last week on the rambla, probably for the repair of the collapsing stretch nearby, and destined to devolve into clouds of dust, tooth-rattling washboards, and suspension-testing potholes (pozos).

Tosca, the "dirt" for roads, Uruguay

I found this spot a little more inspiring a couple years ago, with a funky car and graceful pines.

Car, tree, ocean — Uruguay

They’ve gone, victim of a storm, as have the railings to the then-new boardwalk. And I haven’t seen that car in a long time either, come to think of it.