Hasta luego...

Well, on 11th August I left Uruguay. Why?

Pluses...
I had an apartment, it was comfortable.
The pace of life is slow and calm.
I met a wonderful man who I hope and pray will remain part of my life as well as become my husband, despite the heart-wrenching decision that I made to leave his country.
Relations with my ex-boyfriend had gone from really weird and hostile at times to a more stable friendship, which I hope will continue. I made some great friends through him and acquired a sort of second family.
I met some wonderful local people, who I was teaching English to. My student was very pregnant towards the end and I am happy that I got to hold and feed the baby, and I was honored that they came to the airport to say goodbye to me.
I made some wonderful friends/acquaintances who were foriegners in the same boat as me, so to speak.
I had finally come to understand how to access and manipulate the healthcare system so that my needs could be met.
I had gotten somewhat accustomed to the local food and was learning how to make the Asian stuff that I missed so badly.
There's less junk food available, you have to do a lot of cooking for yourself so its harder to have bad eating habits.

Minuses:
My apartment was a biohazard despite being a comfortable quiet refuge. This was partially my own doing, I am not a good housekeeper. But there was a layer of wallpaper on the walls, under several coats of paint, which was slowly being eaten away by mold. Since living in a cleaner environment the past few days, I am generally much more able to breathe and less dependent on my asthma inhaler - although to be fair I have also drastically reduced my smoking since August 11th and leaving UY.

I was always worried about my apartment being robbed through the claraboya (skylight). To put in bars (the only way to secure it) would have cost 1/3 of a month's salary.

Electricity and telecommunications costs were ridiculously expensive. The Uruguayans would do well to take advantage of the abundant wind and solar power available to them rather than buying electricity from Brazil by way of Argentina. I am not sure that they should privatize their telecommunications yet though...

Fighting with the government bureaucracies to get basic services for my apartment really wore me down and this was the beginning of the end, I think. Getting a telephone installed and actually working 24x7 was an ordeal I would not wish on anyone!

I was tired of the consistent really bad customer service from every public and private entity that I had to deal with, especially Dedicado. As much as I hate Antel, I hate Dedicado twice as much because their accounting is screwed up and the only thing they do efficiently is send bills. They had much difficulty with actually crediting payments to my account and were very very slow to fix any problems. I ultimately took their antenna down myself and delivered it to their office, telling them they could keep their shitty service, after a second four-day-long outage with absolutely no interest being taken by their customer service department in fixing the problem.

Seeing the street children day after day after day was depressing. Several Uruguayan friends were sure that the new government would take care of it, but nothing happened. On the plus side, I could always remind myself when leaving the office - "It could be worse."

The relative inability to travel anywhere outside Uruguay on my small salary grated on me. A weekend trip to Buenos Aires was great - but I had to eat into my savings to make it happen and I knew that places like Macchu Pichu or Iguazu Falls were pretty well inaccessible.

The last straw was factors related to my job. I still won't identify who the company was, but one manager in particular was just a sorete every chance he could get. I am not particularly thin skinned, but to have to put up with crap from this guy every single day - no way - especially when he's bitching at me about performance problems that are caused by his lack of planning. Don't get me wrong - I am really grateful to the company that gave me the opportunity, but if their customers had any idea how their internal network was constructed they might think twice about dealing with them. Of course, when a fair bit of the employees are making three hundred bucks a month - network downtime caused by the cheapest possible chinese-made crap infrastructure isn't all that expensive.

So I quit the job and planned to go back to the USA. I didn't have much option - teaching English is seasonal and the timing was not good for starting a business. The savings account was drained by the failed farm business so surviving the summer was going to quite a challenge as well... And as for getting another job? Well if you read El Pais' classified ads every week you know there are few opportunities. Thus the airport was the only option. I paid my landlord a lump sum to cover the rest of my lease, sold all my appliances and personal posessions, and left with two suitcases and my laptop.

Would I ever go back? Yes, possibly. Retirement in Uruguay might be a nice option, but with an income from another country please... Or I might consider starting another business down there, but I need to sort a lot of stuff out in the USA first and save some money before attempting that. It would be a long way off. I spent nearly USD$20,000 in Uruguay trying to get a business off the ground with my ex, and would not try to start another with any less capital available. It's an expensive, risky place to do business.

I feel I gave the place a fair shake. I thank the Uruguayan government for giving me the legal residency so that I could live there and try that life on for size. I will definitely be back as many times as financially possible as a tourist. Living there was an incredible experience, on balance I am glad I did it.

Being back in the USA is just weird though. All the cars are super-big, all the drinks are super-sized and a visit to the grocery store brings on option paralysis with the huge variety. Lots of super-fat people lumbering around the stores with carts full of high-fat frozen food. I don't think I will stay in the USA for more than a year or two, I am already laying the groundwork for another international move - I want to make a home with my lover and that will be difficult if not impossible to have happen here because of immigration laws.

Thanks everybody for reading what was here. I think this will be the last update, other than to point at a possible new blog about getting reestablished here. Hasta luego...