Este libro se me sugirió de Fede, un uruguayo que conocí por suerte en el candombe de un domingo como todos los otros. Dijo que cambió su vida y le hizo pensar en su “misión de vida”, que para él era algo como ofrecer el amor a los otros en cualquier oportunidad. Sólo unos días después, lo ví en la librería Moebius al lado de la Posada al Sur donde viví cuando estaba en Montevideo, y era casi la mitad del precio de todos los otros libros. No podía no comprarlo.
Bueno, claro que me interesaba el tema, y aunque no podía entender todo, como sigo aprendiendo el idioma español, creo que era un libro bién escrito. Quiero decir que la manera de escribir de señor Weiss era simple pero comunicaba mucho.
Estoy en una fase cuando estoy leyendo muchos libros y material sobre la reencarnación, y algunas veces lo que se encuentra en un libro se contradice por lo que hay en otros. Diferentemente dicho, lo más que investigas, lo más dificil es encontrar fuentes válidas que tienen algo que ver entre ellos en los detalles. Creo en la reencarnación, pero no creo que Muchas Vidas sea el mejor libro para presentar el tema y su profundidad verdadera a alguna persona que ya no está convencida y que mira a la cuestión con un mente crítico, tan por su falta de algún tipo de prueba (quién es Catherine?) como por la impresión que intenta de darnos, que es un libro escrito por un psiquiatra, es una impresión que sin embargo no puede sostener. Este estilo me hizo preguntarme si todo esto realmente sucedió. Parece un mito, una historia basada en hechos reales y como todas las historias similares, es dificíl separar en ella lo verdadero de lo falso. Por eso no valen como pruebas sino como inspiraciones, y esto es sin duda algo muy personal y no cuantificable.
En todo caso, todavía era una lectura interesante con puntos espirituales válidos y con valor para ver la vida por otros ojos, como si el hecho de la inmortalidad del espíritu fuera un hecho indudable, y todo esto la verdá me está poniendo a pensar cada vez más.
Video from Cabo Polonio, Uruguay. Thought of the song immediately after crossing paths with the little critter (I, for one, embrace my apparent lack of originality) and its earworminess has been coming and going at random three weeks now.
Un pequeña exposición por cada día del año tomada de la historia del mundo y de la América Latina. La mayoría son ligeramente interesantes, pero no puedo acordar ninguna en este momento. Bueno, algunas palabras eran más difíciles para mi nivel de español, pero creo que no es mucho que no entendí al nivel de significado. Eduardo Galeano es una importante representación de Uruguay en el mundo, mi primer día en Montevideo era su velatorio, así que tengo un punto suave para este hombre. Quiero ya más libros de él, no sé si en español o otro idioma, Patas Arriba en griego era buenisimo.
Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America (after Suriname), with an area of 176,215km2, making it about 15% smaller than Belarus and 35% larger than Greece. A total of 3,324,460 people call it home and about 1,947,604 (or roughly 57% of the population) reside in the Montevideo metro area on the Río de la Plata. In fact, its urbanization rate is over 95%, one of the highest in the world. Meanwhile (and perhaps contradictory to the previous statistic), close to 93% of its territory is apt for agriculture or pasture, and with existing cattle numbers surpassing 12.000.000 in 2014, Uruguay is world champion of cattle per capita. To reiterate: for each Uruguayan that lives in an urban centre, there are 3.6 bovines living in its vast fields.
The fertility of Uruguayan soils would likely not be possible without its vast river network, which is mainly defined by Río Uruguay and important tributaries in its basin, such as Río Cuareim and Río Negro; Río de la Plata and its tributaries (including Río Santa Lucía, which provides water for Montevideo) and others. OSE is the country’s main public water company, while DINAGUA (the National Water Directorate), along with MVOTMA (the Ministry of Housing, Land Management and the Environment) and a number of other government directorates are responsible for managing Uruguayan water resources.
Major basins of Uruguay
Privatization of management, with some exceptions, has been largely avoided due to the 2004 plebiscite promoted by the National Commission in Defence of Water and Life. The plebiscite, ratified by 64,58% of voters, resulted in a constitutional reform and the inclusion therein of the now famous Article 47. With it, the Uruguayan constitution was the first in the world to give the state sole authority over water management, making privatisation unconstitutional, explicitly stating that “users and civil society are to participate in all planning, management and control of water resources”. In addition, it declared water “a natural resource essential for life” and made access to water and sanitation “a fundamental human right”.
More than a decade later, management of water in Uruguay is now organised by river basins and hydrographic regions: they are the basis for the regional and basin councils regularly called by DINAGUA. These councils, which are meant to be tripartite, allow the participation of delegates from the government, the users (agriculture, pastures etc) and civil society, and are convened to discuss matters of water quality, regional development plans, emergency situations such as droughts, good practices etc. The inclusion of the citizenry in the management of water resources, as mentioned above, became a constitutional right as a direct result of the referendum. However, until now, these councils have been the only formal way of allowing the citizens to have any say in water management and control.
Regional council in Las Cañas, Río Negro
There have been more problems with the actual implementation of Article 47. Apparently, compartmentalisation of power over water resources has become a problem of management: “The water law (predicated by the constitutional reform) is based on management by basin; the territorial legislation law is based on management by political boundaries, by regional department”, says Carmen Sosa, current member of CNDAV and representative of the worker union of OSE in her interview to Rights4Water. “Since authorities for each river basin are so compartmentalised, we need to examine the difficulty of managing water in such a way. It was our inspiration to have a single organisation, a ministry of water, a ministry of the environment, which would bring all the powers together in a single place. For when authorities are so dispersed, when the responsibilities are so dispersed, in the end nobody’s responsible. Management is very complicated when there are ten different organisations in charge—and all with the same level of responsibility.”
Carmen Sosa
According to Mrs. Sosa, the state could make popular participation more viable by making the regional councils and the information discussed therein more accessible to the citizens. “Oftentimes the only thing people know about is the problems that they have: how their neighbour’s well dried up, or how their own water is polluted. But they do not have any information on the context and on what state the country is in for such things to happen.” Most of the councils are presently working with the most serious water-related problem the country’s facing right now: the contamination of the basins by run-off from its soy plantations and its pastures. We shall go more in-depth about this in our next article on water as a human right in Uruguay.
It was 100 pesos for the entrance (~31 pesos to a euro; when I got here 4 weeks ago it was 29—I’m rich!) and another 100 pesos for a strange kind of alcoholic beverage people drink a lot in Uruguay that tastes very much like Fisherman’s Friend. Imagine that, with coke.
A few minutes after I got my drink, her friends started playing their music. The whole concert reminded me of the very first venues in Rock Band, when you first set out and play the easy songs, where supposedly only your friends and some of their friends, at best, come and see you. They were amateur musicians, you could tell: their songs were mostly uncomplicated, and they had a bunch of different instruments, such as unusual percussion (e.g. the lower jaw of a cow, complete with teeth) and types of guitars I would imagine the likes of Inti-Illimani would always keep within arm’s reach. One or two of them were more skilled, but the group as a whole was not. They would go in and out of tune in their polyphonic segments etc. Nevertheless, they left me with a positive impression. I thought they were an interesting group, doing what they enjoy, not caring about perfection and not being scared to experiment in front of an audience.
Then, from the minute I woke up today on, one particular song from yesterday keeps playing in my head. It’s the one in the media player above. It’s a recording I made with my smartphone, that is why the quality is abysmal (I can hear my H2n’s vindictive laugh from the corner—that’s what you get for not having proper sound recording equipment with you ALWAYS ). I can tell that what they’re singing in the chorus is probably “esto no es café” (this isn’t coffee), and I can catch some of the rest of the words but the quality of the recording is so bad and the skill level required for understanding sung language is so high I’m not even bothering.
All that’s nice and good, but something soon dawned on me after listening to his recording a couple of times: I will probably never listen to this song in better quality. This is it.
In this day and age where every original song has a proper recording done in a studio and posted on Youtube, problems like one-off performances, live recordings or poor reproduction quality due to technical reasons seem absurd and things of the lo-tech past. But here we are: an earworm of a song I will never listen to in better quality. If this band never played again, this song would live in posterity in the form of this shitty recording. This realisation gives me similar vibes to listening to the world’s first recording of a song (but not the oldest sound recording in general, that’s too creepy, man). Suddenly you realise it’s a recording; somebody recorded it, it was there and then suddenly thrashed into infinity. It wasn’t born from nothing the way contemporary music makes me think about it sometimes. Somebody was recorded who, after the job was done, left and went on with his or her life. The difference in quality makes me aware of factors I’m sure were invisible for people playing the music. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, anyone? What about “Any sufficiently advanced observer will be able to distinguish between magic and technology?”
You know what though? At least I’m better off than with that Häxan projection with a live soundtrack by No Clear Mind. That was music that rocked my world. I have no recording of it and I will most probably never have the chance to ever even listen to for a second time in my whole life. It makes you wonder what’s important in the end in this art form which has changed so much and has become so very incredibly complex and meta ever since the internet became speedy for cheap, which is actually true for most about everything humans do.
The song is very catchy. The polyphony is excellent, even if not technically perfect. And what’s this genre of music called, if it even has a name? It must, right? There’s an obscure genre for everything. Anyway, I want more!
The bar’s facebook page linked above says their name is “Rocotó”.
PS: After I finished writing this post, I started looking around for more info about this group, starting from the address of the place, and step by step I actually found their SoundCloud. Okay, now I sure feel stupid for writing this whole post above! But here it stands, perhaps as a testament to my beautiful, romantic self-delusion and my tendency to make a story out of limited data and believe it if it sounds good enough? Maybe, maybe. Enough playing philosopher for tonight; here’s a good recording of Rocotó’s music. Enjoy!
My first sample of work from Montevideo. I’ve been here three weeks already and all I have to show is this, but the Uruguay team is not really a team, it’s just me.
In fact, I wrote the questions, shot, cut, transcribed, translated and subtitled this all by myself (with the help of Roberto who asked the questions is arranging most of the interviews, so THANK YOU ROBERTO!), so I kinda feel proud about it, as a token of “I can do all these things!”
Ah, page, we meet again. Hello. Today I decided to write. Express myself, as it were. I fought the distractions… Avoided starting Battlestar Galactica Season 4, despite the fact that Season 3 ended with a bang, it did; I decided not to play Planescape Torment, even though I’ve just started getting into it (and for this kind of games it means playing 10 hours or so). In typical qb style, I even fought off work! I had a nice, warm shower, lay in my warm bed (it’s winter… still hard to wrap my head around it), put some music on that phone that still hasn’t taken full control—I chose Vangelis’ Cosmos—and now I’m here in this right place. The phone proved its supposed smartness by reminding me not to put the volume too high so as to avoid damaging my hearing. As tonight’s token act of proving to myself I’m an adult, I heeded its advice. Maybe the machines aren’t out for us. Pah, who am I kidding.
OK, let’s go. Today I fucked up.
Or, rather, I should say yesterday. But only today did I realise, so it counts as today. Once again I let my overconfidence that everything will be alright cloud my judgement—that sounds suspiciously like a “write 100 times on blackboard” punishment at Jedi school. Sigh… It is one of my greatest weaknesses, and many have noticed, especially those that know me well enough to have pierced at my essence that is invisible to me, similar to a bird who’s only ever known flight can never imagine what it means not to fly, or what sort of happiness a snail might know. Tell a bird it might be flying a bit too much and it’s gonna cock its head inquisitively at you like birds tend to do.
I just aren’t careful. I either want to move fast to be getting to the next task or activity, or, in the face of what we’d call danger in this case, I take that annoying, solipsistic view: “it won’t happen to me, no need to worry!” This is personhood’s very own little facepalm—no, that’s not a good translation of αυτομούτζωμα. I like to take pride in my care-free attitude, or at least the appearance thereof; don’t I know I’m constantly anxious about an entire small museum’s collection of “must-dos”. But that’s another story. I like to say that people don’t really have “positive and negative aspects of their personality.” They only have a single hunk of personality, and according to what side you look at it from, you see different things and judge to whim. Hey, that’s almost exactly like saying that people have personalities and those personalities have positive and negative aspects.
But let met put it this way. Take for example myself. I’m careless and carefree, right? Yes. But these two aspects of me aren’t separate; they’re one. It’s like those digestive biscuits that have chocolate on top. The chocolate is the carefreeness and the underside the carelessness. The whole thing is part of my personality, and the whole box of carelessfreeness, quielation, friendiculousness or abstrant, openular mind is me. I’m this box of biscuits that look the same, because I look the same no matter which biscuit of mine you’re eating. You smell me and taste me the same, and you either love me or hate me… or you might also not particularly care about me. Do you like chocolate digestives?
When I began writing about boxes of biscuits a few lines ago, the point to which I wanted to conclude was that we all are assorted boxes of still different biscuits down a supermarket aisle. Then, however, I chose to pursue the realisation that came to me while writing that yes! People are like food.
Some are so sweet you get sick of them after just a few bites. Others are simple but fulfilling. Others yet are only to be had at parties or thrice-a-year family dinners. You can find each type of person at the supermarket, but there almost always exist the same kind of foodstuff produced locally and tasting better, like that amazing Greek artisanal Nutella that’s not only better, it’s also cheaper.
Some are fancy, others to be enjoyed as part of a familiar routine, some are fresh and organic, many are rotten and/or appear fresh solely because they’ve been peppered with preservatives. We have changing tastes in people and so do we in food. Maturing tastes, perhaps? Some are hot, some are bland. But! The too-bland ones can always spice themselves up; the hotter ones will probably just leave you in tears and gasping for air. But so do onions, at least the crying part. Similarly, there’s a whole lot you have fond nostalgic memories of, but regret every trying them again 20 years later to see if they taste the same. Others are like heaven consistently forever… I presume, I wouldn’t know.
There are hard people, soft people, sweet, bitter, sour and… salty people. Many, sadly, are just plain meat but, although a selective omnivore I may be, it’s sadder when they’re vegetables instead. This is starting to have a Dr. Seuss rhythm to it.
Finally, you would never, ever consider that it’s the broccoli’s fault that Roberto (that’s my Italian coordinator here), with all his exquisite and discerning palate, hates it. I can’t get my head around it: how is it normal for us to think that a person has anything to do with whether others like them or not? Anyway, broccoli can rest easy: I hated it, HATED it when I was a child, you know, it was the archetypical go-to yuck food. Nooow, however, I sometimes even eat it raw. I love it. Broccoli just used to be too sophisticated for my untrained taste buds. There.
One of Terrence McKenna’s famous quotes goes: “”. qb’s version: “the cost of being sophisticated in this society is being the person-equivalent of broccoli.” Or, while we’re at it: sushi. Lentils with yoghurt. NOT eggs: they could crawl back into the chicken’s ass whence they came and I wouldn’t spill water for the dead. Beans. I was damn near allergic to the things most of my life. Now I can eat them no problem due to my insistence to eat them no matter my stomach’s complaints. I can imagine it quietly giving in after all this time: “okay dude, I get it, you took that little song about beans and the heart a bit too seriously, I don’t agree but I can’t stop you… you should know though that this IS going to put a strain on our relationship.”
Wow. This really worked. Remember? Near the top of this text it says I wrote “I fucked up”. It’s even the title of the post. But I’m better already. All day I’ve felt like shit because the bike I rode yesterday for 25km up and down Montevideo’s Rambla and took the following video,
that is, Laura’s bike she hadn’t rode in years and I paid 1000 pesos to have repaired and use it and got it 4 days ago… well, that bike was stolen. All I did was just leave it outside the Posada. Given, it was locked, but with a lock that cost less than 5€ and could probably only protect anything of any value up to that amount. Only today did I notice that all the locked bikes that had caught my eye on the pedestrian street Calle Pérez Castellano during the day, all those bikes I had subconsciously noticed to give my carefreelessness an excuse to run wild, were nowhere to be seen at night, and so was mine by next morning. I can just imagine it sitting there, alone, singing in the dark: “I’m old and rusty, though orange with some new parts e.g. pedals and handles, I’m safe from harm and theft ♪!”
The worst part is that this bike had sentimental value to Laura, so having to tell her that I almost presented the her old bike to thieves and having to deal with questions such as “really, did you leave it outside?” was less than fun. The second worst part is this makes it the, what, 3rd time I’ve had my bike stolen. Last time was in Denmark, where I idiotically left mt bike unlocked going to Danish class, forgot about it for hours after the lesson, went around town, only remembered about it that evening when I had to ride it back home and was all disappointed that the mere act of remembering about it hadn’t been enough to protect it from theft or bring it back.
August 2011, Denmark. This is like one of those “last selfies.”
And there was this other time somebody vandalised my bike parked at Sapfous in Mytilini. I was totally Anakin bringing back his mother from the sandpeople that evening. Only I didn’t slaughter anyone like an animal. I’m civilized. I only ever hold passive-aggressive grudges.
The carcass of my ride on Minwos and Lavyrinthou. Notive the crooked front only wheel
Anyway, back to today. I went to the police office to report the theft as it was suggested to me I do, because apparently Ciudad Vieja is monitored 24/7 by video surveillance; by checking in their records from last night, the police might be able to find the culprit and track them from camera to camera, if they did stay within the boundaries of the Old Town, that is. I can tell you that if my bike is indeed located by the use of video surveillance tech, I’ll be hit by a small-to-medium-sized train of cognitive dissonance. I hate to be that guy, I know how fashionable it is to hate on the police (I don’t like them myself), but ever since my mum’s handbag was robbed and after declaring the theft and the police guys actually CALLING us home to tell us that the bag had been found at a place where “a lot of τσαντάκηδες leave their discarded prey”, it’s been easier for me to feel a tinge of empathy for people who support the police and are disdainful of anarchy. I mean, suddenly when it happens to you, it doesn’t seem so oppressive, does it?
Anyway №13 or something. I fucked up and writing this relaxed me a lot. Its intent was to be a kind of Post-It for futurue qbs to be wary of carelessfreeness, no matter how many times things turn out to be OK in the end, and to remember that it fucking sucks to let people, friends and yourself down and destroy their trust.
But hey, at the end of the day, I’m a chocolate digestive. Some will like me, some will hate me, some will simply not care about me, forget that I exist until I appear before them (at which point they’ll either choose to munch on me absent-mindedly or ignore me) and some will eat the last part of me that’s left in the box all crumbly and melted, but still like me and recognise that not all chocolate digestives from then on out will be crumbly and melty and that if next time I’m in no condition to eat on my own, just throw me on some ice cream or oats, that would be yummy.
Logo I made using Adobe Illustrator for the Rights4Water campaign described in the Uruguay post, in other words, the campaign I’m busy with and will be busy with for the next few months.
It wasn’t chosen as the logo for the campaign, but I’m posting it here anyway because I liked it a lot.
Cheers to Daphne for the Illustrator tips and guidance.
It was my first time to cross the Atlantic, indeed the farthest I’d been from home since my last time in Australia in 2002.
What took me to the second-smallest country in South America was yet another you-only-pay-30%-of-travel-costs European youth project. This one’s called Grassroots Youth Democracy. In it, youth from Greece, Italy, Ecuador, Uruguay, India and Mauritius will participate in joint research on the water context of each participating country, which in turn will culminate in a media product and relevant campaign to raise awareness on the issue of water as a basic human right and common good.
Grassroots Youth Democracy is separated in phases and will take most of our time for the rest of 2015. Phase 1, which was the purpose of the trip I just came back from, was a week-long seminar on water rights in general. Participants had the chance to make presentations of what the water context in their specific countries is, and we also made a first draft of the plan we’re going to use for organising this international campaign between ourselves: who’s gonna do what, what our research methodology will be, what we’re going to with the data etc. After all, co-ordinating a local team can be hard; one strewn across four different continents? Yeah.
Phase 2 will take place in May in Rome and will consist of a media seminar: teaching the participants how to use a camera, do interviews, edit videos, update a website and such things I have the skills to help with. Thank you, University of the Aegean!
Phase 3, which will start right after Rome and last until mid-July, will have the participants from the extra-EU countries come to Greece or Italy and do a field research on the water situation in the respective country, that is collect data for articles, videos and other material to be used in the campaign. There will be interviews with NGOs, analysing stats and delving into the unique water-specific problems of that country. In Greece, for example, the participants will look into what happened with EYATH and its privatisation and how it was avoided by the resistance of the civil society through the 2014 unofficial referendum. They will also research the problem of the lack of drinking water in some Greek islands, such as Aegina, and the sometimes even more problematic solutions corrupted authorities have come up with to alleviate the situation. These are just some examples.
Phase 4 will start right after Phase 3 and last until September. Basically it will be like Phase 3, only the other way around: the Italians and the Greeks, of which there’s four of each, will do the same kind of field research in pairs in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mauritius and India. This is when I’m going back to Uruguay for two months, during the southern heart of winter! No Greek summer for me this year.
After all the above, we’ll collect all the data we’ll have got and make something out of it: a small book, an online database, a documentary, a social media assault… a little bit of everything. This will be our awareness campaign (and I hope it will end up a little bit more exciting than I’m afraid I’m making it sound here.) There will be a final conference/presentation of results but not a lot is known about it yet.
To be perfectly honest, Phase 1 in Montevideo, the one that just finished, needed more outdoors activities. The presentations and material discussed on water issues were interesting and our team-building was successful, but after a certain point I found it hard to concentrate on Powerpoint after Powerpoint and group brain-storming activity after group brain-storming activity. Being in the same room for hours on end with little chance of going out in the warm Autumn sun apart from during the short coffee breaks and the lunch (which was admittedly DELICIOUS and very vegetarian-friendly—THANK YOU CRAZY MARIO, cook of La Fonda!) made it much worse. During the first few days we saw practically zero of the city and at the end of each session I felt much more exhausted than I believe I should have.
No matter. In the end it was a valuable getting-to-know-you with the team and we did some important work. We will just have to work hard from here on out.
…what? You want to read about Montevideo and Uruguay, NOT the seminar? What are you, crazy?!
OK, get this: Uruguay is an extremely interesting country, given its small size and low importance on the grand scale of things. Sorry, let me rephrase that, because everything that’s ever taken place on this planet is of extremely low importance on the grand scale of things—low importance as far as human societies go; countries, politics… you know, that sort of thing. I mean, what do you know about Uruguay?
What I knew was that the country’s (now ex-) president donated 90% of his salary to charity and generally lived super simply, and that recently they legalised marijuana. That’s pretty much everything /r/worldnews would let through the filter. Ahem…
Let me tell you: both of these things are true.
Mujica with his three-legged dog and some maté. More on that in a sec.
José “Pepe” Mujica is seen as a bit of a populist in Uruguay itself, but here are eight reasons why he should be missed by the rest of us, according to The Independent:
1. He donated 90% of his salary to charity. 2. And lived on a farm. 3. He drives a 1987 VW Beetle. 4. And picks up hitch-hikers. 5. He legalised marijuana. 6. He leaves the economy in rude health. 7. He’s just not like other politicians 8. And all that after being shot six times and being put in jail for 14 years for opposing the country’s former dictatorship.
Have a look at the article for a few more details, it’s worth it. What are the chances a guy like this could ever be the leader of your country?
SWIM doing a preparation of a special Uruguayan herbal incense.
Now, that other thing. “You know that in Uruguay marijuana was recently legalised, don’t you?”, said one of the Uruguayan participants to me before I could even ask her anything about it. “Everybody does it here. Even ten years ago people in suits would light one up after work. The thing is, you can’t go somewhere to buy it. Not like that. You have to be a resident and a member of a marijuana club if you want to purchase it. But many people have a little plant or two at home and will soon offer you some!”
I suppose the above is true for young people, but who knows? It didn’t seem to me that marijuana use was 100% socially accepted in Uruguay, there must be some controversy remaining, but it looked close to it. I say they have the right idea. There really is zero reason marijuana should be as illegal as it is in such big part of the world. Zero. Addiction-related issues, whenever they arise, should be treated medically and psychologically, similar to the way alcoholism is treated, not be a matter of concern for law enforcement. This system has already been adopted in a lot of countries. Have a look at this map caught from the wikipedia article on the legality of cannabis around the world:
But there’s a bit more to Uruguay than that.
What does this flag remind you of? They have the same number of stripes, too. Want another fun fact that goes with the similarity between the flags? Both Uruguay and Greece were de facto created in 1828. But, as I learned recently, the Greek flag as we know it now was standardised during the military dictatorship. Before that it used to be simply this:
This was the state flag and the one we use now was the merchant and national flag, before the former was abolished completely.
Back to the othercountry with blue and white stripes on its flag.
Uruguay’s name comes from the river forming the natural border between it and Argentina. It is the indigenous Guaraní language for “the river where the painted birds live.” Beautiful image, isn’t it? It flows out into the that bay to the left of the map, the famous Río de la Plata — the river plate. It’s a hallmark and a point of reference for both Argentina and Uruguay. Some consider this formation more of a river delta than a bay, but really it’s somewhere in between: in Montevideo and even as far out as Punta del Este, the water is much less salty than normal. There’s no clear point where the río ends and the sea starts. Truly a unique formation.
Next: a brief overview of the country in video form. This video was funded by the Uruguayan Ministry of Tourism. I’m serious.
Uruguay es el mejor país: Uruguay is the best country. A semiotically complete touristic message if I ever saw one. We should try something like that back home.
In fact, there’s plenty of other policy “novelties” this country has going for it we should be trying out in Greece. Barring the relatively high cost of living, the not-too-great wages and the kind of plain landscapes (heh), in a few ways it really is one of the best countries out there. For a start, they have managed to stave off privatisation of their public sector almost completely, only selling off their mobile phone operators. Water itself has become a constitutionally-reserved state-managed human right since a relevant referendum was conducted in 2004. That’s impressive no matter what way you look at it. In addition, same-sex marriage has been legal for two years.
All the above together puts most of the “progressive world” to shame, let alone our backwards little country called Greece. Then again, Uruguay is a secular society, in stark contrast to our country where the embarrassingly rich church is still constitutionally connected to the state, which, just to remind you, means that Orthodox Christianity is taught at schools, priests are paid with our hard-earned IMF and European loan money (and pay no tax in return) and the country is still, for all intents and purposes, exclusivelyOrthodox. I won’t get started with nationalism and Greek superiority/inferiority complexes…
Tell me, how many people would you imagine enjoy the benefits of living in this little country? It’s whole population is barely that of Athens at ~3.5 million people, with roughly half of that concentrated in Montevideo. This bit surprised me, because I’ve always thought of South America as the land of mega cities. To illustrate, nearby Buenos Aires has a metro population of almost 4 times that of Uruguay as a whole, and Sao Paulo, which isn’t such a long way away either, is close to 6 times that.
For its modest count of human residents, this small country is the holder of a different record: it has the most cattle-per-capita ratio in the world: there are roughly 3.59 Uruguayan cows for each Uruguayan person. Impressive as that may be, note that this number still collectively accounts for just ~1% of global bovine populations.
Gauchos — Argentinian/Uruguayan cowboys
With so much mooing going on, you’d think the guys would have some decent yogurt. Nope… Even the “integral” yogurt, the one most similar to consistency to the ones we enjoy in Greece, contained sugar. This reminded me of Bulgaria, which most Bulgarians claim to have fantastic yogurt—supposedly very successful and sought after in South Korea. Needless to say, this legendary Bulgarian dairy product is nowhere to be found, or perhaps I tried it and just couldn’t tell the difference. What can I say, years of straggisto are bound to leave a mark.
Not all Uruguayan products are shoddy, though. Far from it. Mate (pronounced máte) is for Uruguayans what frappé is for Greeks, or, according to some Greeks, what it used to be, as freddo espressos have become more popular. Mate is an invigorating hot drink, like coffee or tea, ideally shared among a circle of friends. People drink it in wooden cups that slightly look like coconut shells but are made of gourd (or calabash). In it they drink the mate herb tea, which they infuse with hot water poured from a thermos and refill many times. It is drunk with a metal straw-like instrument called a bombilla (pronounced bombisha in Rioplatense Spanish). In the video below you can see an English speaker preparing mate.
I think I’ve written enough for now. I congratulate you if you made it this far! Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure, half of which are taken by me and the others by Martina.
Punta del Este, a stop on the Greek team’s Atlantic Coast single-day road trip.The wake of Eduarno Galeano. We were lucky (?) enough to have just arrived in the country when this great person passed away.Street Art MontevideoThe view from Faro José Ignacio.Plaza de IndependenciaEach night a different team of participants had to prepare dinner… one of the highlights of the seminar for me.Enjoying empanadas with part of the group.Decoration at the Posada al Sur. A sketch by Quino and a quote by Eduardo Galeano: “Joy requires more courage than sorrow, for, at the end of the day, sorrow we’re accustomed to.”Martina could easily pass for an Uruguana like this!Candombe, the beat of the Montevideo night.View on the Posada terrace and old Montevideo, where the seminar took place. Unfortunately, not upstairs on the terrace.
For dessert:
There is a Milonga at the centre of Montevideo, a public place where people of all ages meet a few times per week to dance and learn Tango.
The song below can be heard most evening at the Milonga and, as I was told, features in the playlists of most tango meetings. It’s called the “Greek tango.” I’m sure you know it.
Muchas Vidas, Muchos Maestros by Brian L. Weiss
Carmen Sosa
