
The fact a 70+ year old pickup in perfect condition is casually parked downtown?
No, it’s the sun. Haven’t seen this much sun in a week, maybe more….
An inquisitive old fart with a camera

The fact a 70+ year old pickup in perfect condition is casually parked downtown?
No, it’s the sun. Haven’t seen this much sun in a week, maybe more….

Well, it’s gotten a new lease on life.

I should have taken a photo yesterday when I saw the owner painting it…with a paint roller.
Years ago I took a picture of the staggering number of colors a VW Beetle had been painted:

Maybe somewhere I have a photo of a car (we saw more than one when we first moved here) that had been painted with a brush.


Well, there is that little zigzag near the front.

…the inconvenience of a convenience store next door. None of these vehicles were moving.

Other duties as assigned – the four door Renault Duster actually has considerably more cargo space than its four door pickup brother, the Oroch.

A classic, even by Uruguayan standards.

Nice mirror mounts. Now how exactly do the windshield wipers work?

Ridiculous? Unless this little truck has hydraulics I can’t even imagine how it got up the ramp to the Tienda Inglesa parking lot, much less navigates speed bumps and legion potholes (pozos) after the recent rains.
The antique Commer truck. September 2012:


December 2014 – mistakenly thought to be a different one:

January 2016: and yet again, parked at the zoo:

Alas, on a dreary day in 2019, that sad truck that appears to have finally reached the end of the line:

Interesting to reflect that this truck was built the year I was born. Happy to report I’m holding up better….
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.
