Thu - February 7, 2008

Sat - February 2, 2008

This is the Beach in the High season

This is what the high season looks like I took this picture in the first week of February. The busiest time is from the last week in December through the first week in January. We had to paint the inside of our house during that time as the painters we hired had gotten paint everywhere (except where we wanted it - on the walls). By mid January we had finished and moved into our new house.

Posted at 08:41 AM     Read More  

Thu - January 24, 2008

Sat - December 8, 2007

The High Season is about to begin

Punta del Este is a vacation destination for many South Americans. The Summer season starts right after Christmas.

Two days ago the traffic lights near the Punta started to flash. Yesterday I was stopped by a light on the Rambla for the first time. Restaurants that have been closed since we got here are starting to open. The blinds, sealed tight on many apartments are starting to be opened and cleaning people are preparing everything for the property owners return.

Punta del Este in the off season is only 30% occupied. It should be very interesting to see it when its in full swing.

Punta del Este in November

Posted at 09:06 AM     Read More  

Thu - December 6, 2007

At last!

My desktop computer is finally here and I can post again

After spending 7 weeks stored in a customs warehouse, I finally got my computer. I have been using my laptop for the past 2 months, and you cant imagine how nice it is to have my desktop back again.

So we are now living in Punta del Este in Uruguay. We are enjoying the onset of the summer. We have bought a car, a house, and are more or less set up. We are having the house painted inside before we move in. That will happen as soon as we close, and that happens in a few day. It is pretty likely that we will have christmas in the new house. Kind of like the first post on this blog!

Posted at 06:14 AM     Read More  

Sat - December 1, 2007

Life in Punta del Este

Punta del Este is a tourist destination in the summer time, just like Friday Harbor (we live in Punta del Este, as it’s in the Southern Hemisphere it is now summer here). The difference is that the high season starts right after Christmas and ends in late February. The number of tourists and those with summer homes here is also a lot higher. About 75% of apartments near the beach have been closed up until just recently, when cleaners and gardeners are busy preparing them for the return of the summer residents.

Another thing that happens around this time of year is the busting of the tax evaders. At the start of the busiest time of year, the local restaurants have been temporarily closed, with the windows covered with stickers showing the business owners have been playing fast and loose with the tax code. After being closed for a few days, during a big tourist weekend everything is back to normal, the stickers are gone and its business as usual.

The relentless promotion of the Christmas season that had started in America in late September has still not happened here. I am holding my breath. Seeing snow scenes and Santa’s sled doesn’t jive with the actual season here. Halloween was an indicator of what was to come, everyone waited until the day before Christmas before getting serious about shopping. 

As is typical, a social aspect to Christmas shopping is important. Meeting people that you know while out shopping and exchanging greetings accompanied by the traditional kiss on the cheek is par for the course. Christmas eve takes on a South American twist in that Everyone cooks dinner on the BBQ and waits until midnight then set off a ton of fireworks before opening gifts.



Uruguayans and those from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all enjoy a traditional barbeque called Parilla (pronounced parija). It is a family event that happens mostly on Sundays and special occasions such as Christmas and new years. Friends and family collect around a specially designed barbeque area that is either close to, or part of the house. The process of “parilla” takes hours. 

First you light the wood, then the fire has to get going so that the embers fall from the cage that holds the wood. Then you cook the meat. Most invitations for such events start at 8:30 or later. You may not eat until 11pm or midnight. We have still not gotten used to the late dinners. 

Our first invitation to a parilla was for 8:30pm when our younger kids start going to bed. Fortunately the host was from Rhode Island, but had lived here for over 10 years. He understood our needs and changed the time to 6pm. It was lovely. He and his girlfriend, their 3 kids (who arrived and walked around the table kissing everyone on the cheek) and his Mother and Father hosted a delightful evening including Chorizo, short ribs and a selection of salads. 
The addition of Scotch and “Tannat” the local grape varietals of red wine kept the event true to the Uruguayan way. At the end of the evening we exchanged phone number with the parents, and promised to do it all again. 

Unlike in the US, people in Uruguay don’t walk around with to-go cups of coffee. Instead they have a gorde, that is encased in leather with a silver rim and a straw for their Yerba Matte, and to keep the drink going they all carry a thermos under the crook of the arm that they carry the gorde in.

There is a whole isle in the supermarket for different types of matte and nothing else. It is not exclusive to Uruguay, but Uruguay consumes more matte than any other country in South America. I tried it, it looks like lawn clippings in a cup and tastes a bit like it too. It is somewhat interesting, enough for me to buy a cup and make it from time to time.

Posted at 03:22 PM     Read More  

Thu - November 1, 2007

Impressions of Uruguay

So we bought a car not long ago, this is how you do it in Uruguay. You go to the bank and get the cash you need. This is done more or less the same way as Las Vegas, only they are more anal about the whole process here. The money that we took to the car dealer was in cash, with. big wads of $10k each and small ones of $1k each. Cars here are very expensive, but no one blinks an eye at when you drop this kind of cash on their desk.




The teller opened her drawer, and found she was a bit light on dollars at the time. No matter a quick visit to the vault and here you go. In the interest of secrecy, they gave me a giant pink envelope with "Banco de Republic Y Uruguay" on it. 

So with a pink bundle with the national banks name on it the size of a brick bulging in my pocket, I left the bank and headed home. After all the dealer didn't open for another couple of hours. I think walking to a US car dealer with cash would cause a second degree terrorist alert!

We had some wicked wind the past few days. The surf was wild and the tide was super high. Some trees blew down and the temperature dropped a lot (50f) some trees blew over and closed a couple of streets, but not much of that. 

The surf almost engulfed the entire beach. 



When the storm was over the beach had been reshaped and was a simple flat plane sloping down to the water. Now the temperature is heading back to the 80's and 90's.


This is the same area a day later - without the wind. The surf is over 100 feet back from where it was and the waves are more or less gone. Punta del Este is the collection of buildings that are above the water on the right. The taller ones closer by are condos.

Hey check out our new house, We close in a month! Its 4 bedrooms and 5 baths, but the rooms are small. 


We need to paint the inside other than that its under a 10 year warranty by the architect (required by law in Uruguay), it has a pool, but the pool and house are not nearly as big as the ones we had. A lot different from our old house but thats fine for us.


Posted at 03:24 PM     Read More  

Tue - October 30, 2007

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 at 03:25 PM     Read More  

Mon - October 15, 2007

How we ended up in Uruguay

“what about Belize?” An innocent question that started the ball rolling. It was late morning in March of 2007. A rare clear day with light wind and no rain for a pleasant change. We would try to take a walk down the road each day, but weather didn’t always permit.

Its funny how one question can change so many things. Rather than give me an irritated “are you out of your mind?” look, she smiled and nodded. We talked some more on the way down the road, then turned around and headed back home.

Once we arrived we sat in the office and started looking at Belize. “What about Panama” said Brook.....

We ended up passing on Belize because it looked a little third world. Panama was more interesting. It was easy to get a visa, it had certain tax advantages for foreigners who wanted to live there, and more for people who wanted to build a house there. It had beaches and an equatorial climate. It had first world infrastructure and was a fairly short trip to the US. Brook and I booked tickets to visit and see the place. We contacted an immigration lawyer and got ready to visit.

Some part of this move had to do with the previous bitterly cold winter in Friday Harbor Washington. We started the winter by having more rainfall than any other October in recorded history. Over 20 inches in October alone. This was followed by more rain and three significant snow storms that closed the island down for as much as a week. The land was so saturated with water that when it kept raining, Bailer Hill road, a major road on the south end of the island ended up being under 3 feet of water. A picture in a local online paper showed someone rowing a boat passed a mail box on Bailer hill road.

Another part of it was Brook’s stroke the October before. At the time we owned a pilates business that Brook ran, and a deli and bakery that I ran. I had come home from work in the afternoon and started talking to Brook. Everything seemed fine at first but she never said any words. After a short time I asked her to say something, but she was only able to nod and say “hmmm”. This led to an emergency trip to the doctor, followed by a flight to Harbor View Hospital in Seattle where we spent a few days. I watched as test after test was performed on her. A few days later Mimi arrived and took over the vigil at the hospital so I could go back and take care of the kids.

After the stroke, we felt that we should do what made us happy, and it led us to consider lots of things in a different way.

So while we waited for our travel date to hit, we thought about Argentina. I had heard people talk it up as a great place so we started to look at it. There where some things that made it more compelling, like Donald Trump wasn’t building anything there! Buenos Aires had a lot to offer, and they had recently outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants. We changed our reservations and headed down to Buenos Aires for Easter. This time it was just Brook and I as Toni was taking care of the kids.

We really liked Buenos Aires, but it had 2 major strikes. It is a huge city, of 15 million people, and it had the added issue of having school issues – the schools we liked had waiting lists. In some cases when siblings had been counted, the classes had –6 spaces. There was another school that we found, but that was a long way from where we wanted to live.

On our flight back, we met and chatted with an oil executive who had been to Buenos Aires on Business. We told him our plan and he asked if we had looked at Uruguay. We thought nothing of it at the time. Later, when we thought of the size of the city and the lack of beaches, we started looking at Uruguay.

Posted at 02:02 PM     Read More