fuck the poor

That was the note on which my night out (or rather morning to be exact) ended.

I went out with my friend M., her idea was to introduce me to another friend of hers that she thought I would like, but that didn't work out so it was just the two of us.

Friday evening started out pretty much as normal, go to the gym, work out, go to the grocery store, have a little dinner, etc. and then head over to where M. was.

M. is an interesting person. I don't mention her by name because... well, you'll see in a minute. I met her when I was teaching English classes at Berlitz (awful, awful place to work). She had dark black hair, lots of black makeup around the eyes, freely admitted during class that she was a little disoriented because she'd taken pills, and would come up with these crazy sexual ideas during class discussion that I'm sure the rest of the class - four men no younger than 35 for sure - appreciated but were just sort of out of the blue and disorienting to the matter at hand, which was teaching business English. But she was there, her parents paying the super-high prices for the classes and the AOL-Time Warner product-placement laced teaching material and out of the whole time I worked there, she's the only student I remained in contact with.

M. went off to England for a period of time, her intent being to go and stay there, but was persuaded ultimately not to overstay her visa - it would mean being effectively trapped there waiting to be discovered and deported with the doors closed to most civilized countries. See, getting deported is no walk in the park... you get a big stamp in your passport much like a Scarlet Letter. Any consulate of any civilized country that sees such a stamp is not going to give a visa to that person. You can't just "lose" the passport and get another without the stamp, because most countries have agreements with others that if one of their citizens has been deported and replaces their passport, causing a number change, they will update all of the countries with whom they have good relations of the new and old number as well as the reason for the update. It truly marks one for life, a deportation... But like many Uruguayans, she has sufficient family links to European countries that with some bureaucratic doings she can get an EU passport, eventually and with a lot of patience and a whole pile of documentation. So she's back, waiting for her mother to get her EU passport, in which case M. can get the same countries passport fairly quickly.

So anyway I got home and heard the phone ringing while I was in the shower. I don't try to go get it because that would mean trying to run with wet feet across a tile floor, which is a recipe for a broken bone. Whoever it is can leave a message on voicemail. Finally they call back and it was M., wanting to give me directions to where we were going to meet - at the apartment of one of her friends. So her friend got on the phone and gave me this very complicated (overly complicated) series of directions relative to Montevideo Shopping. (The english word shopping has crossed into Uruguayan Spanish and translates as 'mall'.) I wrote it all down, looked at it and decided that I was going to roll my own directions because it appeared to be taking me somewhat out of the way. We don't have Mapquest or any of their ilk here, but there is a site called www.mapred.com where you can enter a street name, door number (literal Spanish-English translation of the Spanish term for house number), city and country and then get a map of the area, much like Mapquest. I copied the relevant streets onto a makeshift map with street names and landmarks labeled, and off I went by bus.

It took forever for a bus to arrive going in that exact direction - after 11 pm there is very infrequent bus service in MVD - but finally I was off. I was very pleased to get off the bus at the exact cross street I needed and then make my way to the destination, without the other directions that, while well-meaning, would have taken me 2km out of the way in pouring rain. The only wrench in the works of my plan was the lack of street signs at the corners, I had to make little detours at times to figure out which cross-street I'd just passed because the street name is on just about every building, but its very small and almost never visible from the corner - another reason a car is a pain in the butt here.

The apartment building was being remodeled, and being remodeled for the worse it appeared... floors here are tile, ceramic, concrete... carpeting would just rot away in no time with the humid weather conditions. But this building was putting a fake wood veneer over top of their tile floor. The job hadn't been finished and it already looked like shit with big gouges in the veneer where people had gone across with wheeled suitcases or bicycles or whatever, and they did a very bad job of matching the veneer with any stairs. It was obviously a very expensive material, but it was not suited at all for a high-traffic area like an apartment hallway.. But I digress.

M. and her friend were waiting with pizza, faina and diet coke. Faina is what they accompany pizza with here, sort of an analog to garlic bread but made of corn meal. Think corn bread, but greasy and much more dense. Sometimes its vaguely onion flavored and its always salty. It has much the same flavor as the cover of a hard-covered book, in my opinion. They had two types of pizza - the regular with just tomato sauce and no cheese and figazza which has no sauce and is covered in onions, olives and red pepper. I prefer figazza but the olives and red pepper wind up in a neat little pile on the plate when I'm done because I don't like them much.

So we ate, caught up on our lives etc. because we chat frequently on msn but don't see each other in person all that often... and off we went by cab downtown. The cab driver of course asked a couple of probing questions about which route to take - it's a test of your knowledge of the city naturally to see if he can take you out of the way and run up the meter. Our response was detailed and nearly turn-by-turn so as not to get screwed.

Well, it wound up that the club we were going to had closed, or for whatever reason was not open, nor did M.'s friend turn up. Oh well. Undaunted we walked a short distance into the Ciudad Vieja (old city) and went to a club called Kasbah. That turned out to be sort of fun in that I ran into Mary, a British aquaintance, and we had a chance to briefly catch up. Mary's... uncle or some relative is the owner of Kasbah - he'd originally opened it as a furniture store but Ciudad Vieja is not a good place for that kind of business in MVD so he turned it into a bar.

We got bored with being there after a bit and set off on the quest for a change of scenery. Ciudad Vieja is very very alive and crowded on Friday nights, much different from during the day when most of the clubs are closed and the barren streets just generally smell like piss from the night before. Chock full of cops too, but Uruguay can afford lots of cops because they pay them low wages for long hours. We wound up at The Shannon, which is MVD's only irish pub. What a strange clash of cultures... Uruguayans wearing union jack shirts and drinking green beer (which The Shannon has year round) and of course the typical menu that every Uruguayan eating establishment has... selection of Chivito, milanesa, sandwich caliente blah blah fucking blah. All of this was set to a background of predominately American pop music. Globalization produces some weird mixtures. I had a sandwich because I was hungry and M. and I talked for a couple of hours about life in general as well as laughing our asses off at some of the weird culture clash as well as laughing partcularly hard at this woman at the table next to us who was seated and wearing really low-cut jeans - so low cut that you could see nearly all of her ass and the frilly red thong underwear she had on - she was blithely unaware that she was damn near showing her junk to the whole world... Anyway, some guys at a table next to us overheard us speaking in English and asked where we were from.

Everyone is very surprised when I tell them I live here, but I'm used to that...

The conversation turned to politics of course, I am frequently asked how I voted for president. People here always like to berate whatever American is handy about the country's foriegn policy, so I make a point of telling them that I intensely dislike and disagree with the current regime in Washington, thereby avoiding hearing Yet Another Tirade about it. And then the conversation turns to Uruguayan politics. This guy says to me (in Spanish) "Here, I can't believe it. We elected communists because that's what the poor people wanted." He switched to English for just one phrase. "Fuck the poor people." And he went on and on about how the new government was going to be bad for his fathers business and blah, blah blah. I was tempted to tell him that had I had the right to vote, I would have voted Frente Amplio too in an effort to kick out the kleptocracy of the Colorado party - but decided not to because they were pretty drunk and I didn't want to start a fight.

M. and I decided we didn't want to talk with these stuck-up brats from Carrasco. Fuck the poor indeed. Jerks. So we called it a night. Rather than waiting up to an hour for a bus to show up, I grab a cab and went home.