We are in Uruguay




We have been in Uruguay a week now, and all is well. We have had a little rain, but nothing compared with what we are used to. Now the weather has really improved. I have heard that the whales come to Punta del Este in August, but this year they have stayed and we saw them swimming within a few hundred feet of the beach just after lunch. We are not sure what type, I will send you info when we figure that out. All the books on local animals and plants are in......Spanish.... still lots to learn there.

Yesterday we opened a bank account. The process itself takes about an hour and a half. That presumes a lot goes well. The first issue we ran into had to do with the account numbers. Non Uruguayans get different account numbers - the "system" is stocked with a limited number of them. Once they run out, the system needs to have new numbers added by the network administrator. No one knows when the numbers run out until the system refuses to produce an account number for a non-Uruguayan. 

Once this happens, you might as well go do something else because it requires a call to HQ, an instruction to the network admin, and time. At least half an hour. Not so bad, that same instruction in the US could take... who knows! During that time we went to order DSL for our house. When we came back all went well, and in not a lot of time we had an active account.

The DSL order caused some other problems. The phone at our house stopped working. This caused another problem - the alarm company could not call us when we had password trouble (about 80% of the time - I am good at things like this but for some reason there is some trick to when and how you enter the password and I don't know what it is and my Spanish isn't enough to figure it out). We would trigger the alarm by accident - usually the phone would ring and we had to give a pass word and tell the alarm company in poor Spanish that everything is OK. I thought we might have set off the alarm too many times and they had given up on us. Instead the phone didn't work, so the second the alarm triggered and we didn't get a call they sent a car around. The guy politely rang the door bell and spoke to me in Spanish, most of which I didn't understand. I responded in “Spanglish” explaining that I had just ordered internet and that is most likely what happened to the phone - after a few minutes of almost complete bewilderment we both mentioned the property managers name so I called her. Her phone didn't answer. So he asked my name, smiled, introduced himself and left.........

My Spanish is getting way better, but in context that means that I understand 5% instead of 3%. While this may seem like a huge triumph in language skills it is still not enough to understand what is going on in most cases. On the positive side, I am way better at Spanish than I was!

The kids LOVE school. Emma is so excited to wear uniform! She has 5 new friends all bilingual. She has not made a lot of effort to speak Spanish yet, maybe we need to work on that this summer. Eli and Erin are having fun too. For the first week we pick them up from school for lunch and bring them back after (90 mins). Drop off is at 8am and pickup at 5pm. Long day but they like it. Another big difference is that they don't have homework. After a long day like that I wouldn't want it either.

Today after dinner we walked to the beach and played for a while. Everyone came home exhausted and went right to bed.

We are working on buying a car, it sounds easy.....

... More about that later.

Posted: Tue - October 30, 2007 at 03:25 PM      

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