Ohmyiminuruguay

Arrival

 

Already delighted by...

 

-The sheets on my bed are exactly the kind of sheets I would´ve picked out myself

-Finding a radio station that plays All Dina´s Favorites from the 80s

-There´s two places to sit in my bathroom! That´s right... I´ve got a bidet!

-The patio on my (not to brag) 12th Floor Penthouse Suite Apartment is the size of the apartment itself. When I stand outside, looking out over my new city, I am the Queen of Montevideo!

-The look of genuine concern on the face of the TAM Airlines stewardess when I told her I´d twisted my ankle the day before

-The Amazing Race wheelchair dash through Terminal 2 in the Sau Paolo airport--I was concerned about missing my connecting flight and getting stranded in Brazil, but it was SO FUN to be pushed in a wheelchair by that guy booking it down the hall to my gate, it was everything I could do to stop from shouting "WHEEEEEEE!!!" 

-The Amazing Race ended inside an elevator whose doors closed behind us, then refused to move. We backed out, the guy frantically hit the buttons on the other elevator, which also didn´t work, leaving us no choice but to abandon the elevator and walk down an MC Escher maze of steps, him running ahead with my bag as I limped behind, still thinking this was funny...

-Is this a South American thing? Landing an airplane in the middle of the tarmac, miles and miles away from any discernible gate, leaving passengers to walk down the steps of the plane and board a series of shuttle busses that weave wildly around each other as they careen towards the terminal?

-The doorman in my building greeted me with this afternoon with what sounded like, "Bon Natale!" Did he just wish me Merry Christmas?

-The celebration of San Patricio Day makes the nightly news

-The lacy toilet paper roll cozy in my bathroom

-I spent $455 on toilet paper, instant coffee, a bandage for my ankle, a baguette and a kiwi

-Watched "The King´s Speech" on the plane-caught the beginning where the two protagonists meet and are instantly in conflict, slept through the middle, woke up in time for the inspirational ending where the two protagonists have resolved their differences and made history and my first thought was, "Didn´t Geoffrey Rush used to be younger?" Like, I thought he used to be young enough that he couldn´t be as old as he apparently is now... (it was a long flight)...

-Listening to Supertramp´s "Breakfast in America" on TAM´s in-flight music programming

-Shutting off my 80s soft rock music station to hear Sinead O´Connor´s "Nothing Compares 2U" playing from the neighbor´s apartment

 

Buzz

So I feel a little foolish already--tried to explain to the doorman who speaks no English that I thought I heard someone buzz my apartment at 8:30 am, and when I went to answer the phone for the door no one was there and I wanted to make sure I didn´t miss someone in case it was the airport delivering my bag that as of yesterday, the airline wasn´t sure which country it was in (or even which airline was directly responsible for it not getting on a plane), and I also wasn´t sure if maybe it wasn´t possibly my boss, who said he would come pick me up to take me to school today but also said he would call first, so it seemed unlikely it was him but then again I wasn´t sure. The doorman didn´t understand and took me to the 11th floor to consult with The Man Who Speaks English, who didn´t speak enough English to understand my barely awake still jetlagged embarrassed sputtering about how I thought I heard a noise that might have been someone trying to buzz my apartment, along with my insistence on using the word "buzz" as a verb and a growing awareness that possibly no one buzzed my apartment and I just heard the buzzer in one of my neighbor´s apartments. The Man Who Speaks English had to stop me, and go into his apartment to get his wife, She Who Speaks Better English, to whom I explained my whole missed buzzer theory, and she asked the doorman if anyone had buzzed my apartment, and he shook his head no, and she explained that it may have been the window washers who use some sort of buzzing-noise-producing equipment that can sound like the door buzzer. She also offered to water the plants on my veranda if I didn´t feel like doing it, since she takes care of them when no one is occupying the apartment, and that if the airport needed a place to drop off my bag when I wasn´t home she would gladly accept them at her apartment. She asked me how long I'd be staying and I told her until July; she said that should be enough time for her and her husband to "get used to" me, and I'm afraid I've already established a reputation for myself as the spazzy American upstairs who's going to come running downstairs in her pajamas first thing every morning complaining of phantom buzzing noises and invisible visitors.

 

I then returned to my apartment to shower and prepare to teach two classes a week in English to upwards of 40 Spanish-speaking students.

 

As it turns out, "I thought I heard my doorbell ring but I'm not sure if someone rang my doorbell and I wanted to check if someone came by in case it was someone from the airport with my lost luggage," is NOT in the Lonely Planet Spanish phrasebook.

Domo Arigato, Señor Roboto

The cashier at Supermarket DISCO asked if I had a MAS club card, to which I replied, "Bueno." She asked me if I spoke English (what gave me away?). She told me (in English) how she's programmed to ask people for their club cards, almost like a robot, and how she even dreams about it--she'd had a dream about not being able to find her club card, and woke up in a panic. I told her I'd had jobs like that before, where you have to ask someone for a card before each transaction and you find yourself saying the same thing over and over to each person who approaches you throughout the day. As I picked up my bags at the end of the checkstand, I heard her ask the next person for their MAS card, and then tell a story in Spanish, using the word "robot."

 

Something to know about dairy products in Uruguay--the product that is sold in what would be considered a milk carton in the States is not milk, but yogurt. I discovered this as I attempted to pour yogurt into my coffee this morning. The carton is labelled "yogur", and even with my poor Spanish language skills I knew what that word meant, but I so much wanted milk to be in that milk carton and I couldn't find milk anywhere else in the store, I persisted in believing I'd bought some sort of yogurt beverage, or yogurt-flavored milk, because clearly, it had to be milk if it was being sold in a milk carton.

 

Observed out the window of The Sweet House while I was drinking a very tiny, very potent cup of coffee: a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a New York state license plate attached to the bumper next to the Uruguayan plate. A couple minutes later, a car drives by with large vinyl sticker lettering across the rear windshield that read JETHRO TULL.

Cognitive Dissonance Study #1

Television is somehow more charming in a foreign language--or at least, in a language foreign to you in a country where everyone else can speak it just fine. Extra charm is added when it's an American film you've never seen, dubbed in Spanish, that you tune into about half an hour in after the premise and main characters have already been established and things are already happening between characters based on the premise that you've missed.

 

Case in point: the movie I saw last night, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack. From what I could gather, Diane Lane is a professional woman who has met John Cusack, also middle-aged and single--I couldn't tell if they were meeting for the first time at the dog park, when I started watching, because later Diane Lane is checking her PerfectMatch.com messages, and one seems to charm her, and the next scene she's at dinner with John Cusack (Did they meet on PerfectMatch.com and then arrange to meet in person at the dog park, or did they meet at the dog park and then John Cusack stalked Diane Lane on PerfectMatch in order to ask her out?) What's funny about the dinner scene is that they appear to be at an "ethnic" restaurant, possibly Spanish or Mexican, and John Cusack attempts to impress Diane Lane by speaking to the owners in their native language, and then the owners talk amongst themselves in their native language, which is subtitled in Spanish, but I couldn't tell if what they were saying was dubbed in a different language, which seemed to disrupt the whole suspension-of-disbelief required to watch a movie--in order to drop into this film about two now Spanish-speaking Americans who meet and fall in love, I have to believe their characters speak Spanish. But then they go to a restaurant, where one character needs to speak a foreign language to the owners, who then speak to each other in a foreign language--but if that foreign language is Spanish, that makes the Accepting a Cinematically Established Fictional Reality section of my brain short circuit.

¡Dia de la Oficia!

My first full day at the office--¡Dia de la Oficia!--I met a lot of people, and a lot of people kissed me. Uruguay is a kissing country. When you meet someone for the first time, or when you see someone you know, you walk up to them and put your face next to theirs and kiss them. And then you kiss them again before you leave. But you don't kiss them directly on the cheek, it seems like you air-kiss them next to the cheek, with cheek to cheek contact but lips not quite to the cheek--at least that's what people were doing to me all day. Maybe you get the full-on lips-to-face kiss once you're able to reply to the question, "Como esta?" with words, instead of a frightened look and the panic-induced silence of having just forgotten the one thing you do know how to say in Spanish.

 

Random complaints: Montevideo's gorgeous but can be a bit noisy. I was telling my boss and my teaching assistant about everything that was going on in my neighborhood over the weekend: the outdoor rock concert, the soccer game, the airshow, the fireworks, as well as the screams from both the amusement parks on either side of my apartment building and the constant roar of motorcycles racing the strip along the beach. I told them this over the sound of jackhammering and falling chunks of cement outside my office window that complement the school's continued construction.

 

BIDET UPDATE: So yesterday afternoon, standing over the bidet, I decided to play with the knob, to at least see what it did. After fiddling with some metal thing I thought was a handle, I found a round thing to twist, that shot a stream of water straight up, spraying the wall. Mierda santa! Sitting on that bidet would be like straddling a fire hydrant! What is going on in this country that there's barely any water pressure in the shower, but the bidet stream could pierce bricks?

 

Viento Loco

¡Tiempo es LOCO! Wind is roaring--woke up in the middle of the night to car alarms going off, not sure if the wind was rocking the cars or stuff was blowing down onto them? Kept thinking of something my friend Amy said while teaching a yoga class once--about how in the Dominican Republic, the way to prepare for a hurricane is to open all the doors and windows and let the winds pass through. Any means of resistance only brings destruction, and the only way to avoid destruction was to not resist, to surrender and let it pass.

 

I still felt like I needed to make sure all the windows were securely closed. I brought home a school computer yesterday that's now occupying the kitchen table directly in front of a set of sliding glass doors. Uruguayans seem pretty chill, but I'd prefer not to test them with, "I surrendered your computer to the ebb and flow of the universe, man."

 

Something else to file under "Loco": Tire fire in the middle of the intersection outside the front doors of the school yesterday! There was a row of protesters holding up a long banner on the other side of the flaming pile of rubber, a banner covered in words I of course couldn't read. I made out the word "economica" (Esta l'economica, stupido!), and burning tires seemed to reference the oil industry, but I wasn't sure whose oil industry was being targeted. I mentioned it to my boss later, who said he hadn't noticed--he said something about how the Argentinean embassy was directly across the street from the school, and that there had been "problems with them lately." He didn't elaborate but also didn't seem terribly concerned, so I took his cue and decided to save my inquiry into the nature of Uruguayan-Argentinean relations for another day.

 

Side note: Did the US go to war with Libya yet? I turned on the TV last night hoping to catch some news, but instead all I could find was Talento Argentino, essentially America's Got Talent but with Argentineans and seven more hours per episode. I did see this circus troupe comprised of about thirty people doing acrobatics simultaneously in front of a video display of a clown's worried face spinning around in circles, followed by a teenage girl singing a Celine Dionized version of Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah".

 

At 8pm, listening to the radio--I believe what I'm hearing is a call-in advice show for children, where kids troubled by life can call in to speak with a straight-talking middle aged woman who tells it like it is and puts their fears to rest. At least that what it sounds like to me from their inflection, since the only words I can understand are "como" and "no".

Hippie: The International Language

 

This morning's taxi driver was a man wearing mala beads who looked like Len Lye and was listening to Hindu chant music, the kind of music usually played in yoga classes. First he tried to sell me the CD (only 100 pesos, the equivalent to $5 US, but I still didn't go for it), then we talked about Sanskrit chants, the origins of Reiki, and how there's not many Buddhists in Uruguay. He said it's because most people in Uruguay don't want to be illuminated. Apparently he's the only one. This conversation happened in English--in Spanish, it wouldn't have gotten as far. Since it was happening in my native language and I was interested in the subject matter, the taxi driver asked me my name and introduced himself as Ariel, explaining that his name means "Lion of God". When we arrived at school, he asked for my phone number and I got a little weirded out and told him I didn't have a phone. I paid him my fare in the sacred amount of 108 pesos.

 

Mixed Meatia

Dinner choices: chicken stuffed with ham, or beef stuffed with hardboiled egg. Opted for chicken, only because I'd just had the beef-and-egg recently and wanted to try something else. Frightened by how delicious meat-in-a-meat is, and how much I enjoy eating mixed meat cuisine.

Long, Long Way From Home

 

I met one of the video game design teachers today, a fluent English-speaker who has obviously spent a lot of time in the US as demonstrated by his wearing of a Giant Robot baseball cap, hipster-design neon graphic print tee and jeans. His outfit was noteworthy in that it was in such stark contrast to the usual costume of the rest of the male faculty and administration--the hyper-formal dress shirts and dark slacks, occasionally coupled with a suit jacket. It's a style intentionally modeled after European business dress that no one appears entirely comfortable in--you can tell everyone's just crawling to get out of their banker's get-up and into a t-shirt and sweats.

 

My Giant Robot-clad colleague gave me the general tourist advice run-down--how the city's very safe, but don't go wandering around by yourself in the middle of the night, keep your purse close to you, don't go walking around waving fistfuls of large bills over your head with a variety of valuable portable digital devices hanging out of your pockets, etc. But he punctuated his advice with a gesture in my direction, a knowing look , and the phrase, "And you've got "foreigner" written all over you!"

 

"Foreigner" written all over me? OK, so I'm sure it's obvious to others that I'm definitely not from around here; perhaps my fashion sense is a little out of step (though assuredly not any more out of step than it already is back home), and isn't helped by the look of confusion and terror that crosses my face when encountering even the simplest and most everyday interactions with people who perform these interactions with me in Spanish. But seriously? This guy looks more American than I do!

 

Chivito

I am proud to announce that I ate chivitos for two nights in a row, and am maintaining a perfectly regular heartbeat without any major circulatory interruptions.

 

What's that you say? Oh, you've never heard of this thing called a "chivito"? Well, allow me to explain!

 

Say you've got yourself a little piece of steak, something along the lines of a stripsteak, except some kind of special Uruguayan cut of beef in the tradition of a culture that worships beef and is intuitively predisposed to cutting a cow in the best tasting way possible. Put your little steak on a bun, add some mozzarella cheese, some grilled onions, maybe some grilled red peppers. Ok, sounds like a typical Philly steak sandwich, right? Well, add some bacon. Not that crazy? Well, now add some grilled ham. Yes, on top of the bacon. Now add some green olives, some tomatoes. Cover in a thick layer of garlic mayonnaise. NOW ADD AN ENTIRE HARD-BOILED EGG. Affix the top bun to your pile of sandwich with a toothpick--don't forget to spear the green olive first! Serve with an entire additional plate full of French fries. It's chivito time!

 

If you're feeling adventurous, top this off by sucking down a cafe de crema--an espresso shot docking a giant ball of whipped cream (ordered because I'm not sure how to ask for a cafe with just milk). Drink it in a hurry because you're on your way to an art opening! Make sure to pick the beef out of your teeth first!