I thought that that would be my last post but I have an indelible connection to Uruguay.
I've spent the last year as a road warrior. The end of November I had the flu and then on the very next consulting engagement the client pulled a last minute cancellation despite having received assurances that I was going to be there. My boss went into megabitch mode and my resume went on Dice. I told her I had the flu, you'd think someone would cover that detail - nevermind a series of emails right up to the last minute assuring their help desk manager that I would indeed be there got exchanged. I was supposed to get paid for three days and I had to beg her to pay me for even one - money I still have not seen and its what, almost mid-January?
To be fair it had been an awesome job. I was really good at it and loved the changes of scenery - although the travel schedule was grueling. But that was that - I worked my ass off for that woman and she decided to quibble over a relatively small amount of money. So that was that.
But I also realized something after I'd had the novel experience of being home for a few days - the all travel job and the fantasy world of airports, hotels and rental cars was a great big wall that kept me from truly rejoining and accepting US culture and its evolutions during my time abroad. I physically arrived back from Uruguay over a year ago. It was the first week of December 2006 that I reconnected with the cultural norms and reality of US society for sure and certain. It was bumpy, too!
So I've almost made peace with being back in my home country. The experience absolutely changed my life in some incredibly positive ways, although there were, to be sure, some negatives.
Now Scottsdale, Arizona has become a home rather than a mailing address. My apartment is a home and no longer a place to sleep for the little bit of time I was ever home.
Despite being physically and mentally home I cannot abide the idea of losing my fluency in Spanish. I live in the SW part of the USA so I can get the Sky Mexico signal with a 1-meter dish. Sky Mexico is a TV service received by satellite just like DirecTV - so much like DirecTV that Murdoch owns it too. It takes some doing to get a receiver, the smartcard that decrypts the signal as well as the account to pay them to activate the smartcard. But living where I do I inevitably ran into a company that would provide me with all of the things I needed as well as a procedure for paying the bill each month. The receiver tells me what I owe and then I call south of the border to customer service and pay with a credit card. Done.
It's been great for maintaining my fluency. I got hooked on watching television news from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela and Uruguay too. Yep, for 30 minutes every day on this channel called OTI one can watch the Channel 4 evening news from Montevideo and see their spin on international politics as well as the local news. The local news is still relevant to me - I know about the politics, the byzantine government bureaucracies (ever seen the movie Brazil?) and the biggest issue of all: the paper pulp plant.
I wish that the Argentines would just shut up already about the paper pulp plant being built in Uruguay. The industrial plants around Buenos Aires put out far more pollution refining oil, making all manner of processed foods including Frito Lay chips and indeed a huge range of consumer products. The Uruguayans desperately need the foriegn exchange that the paper plant will provide and the country has an abundance of fast-growing Eucalyptus trees - a few hectares* of trees can be cut providing tons of wood to be turned into pulp and about five years later the trees will have grown back to the same size.
Or at least I think the idea is to use the Eucalyptus wood thats in abundance. I don't know a darned thing about paper - it just doestn't concern me unless the roll in the kitchen or bathrom runs out. Then I'm off to the store to do a comparison of the unit prices - brand loyalty to a commodity like paper just doesn't occur to me. But I hope they're using Eucalyptus in any event.
The Argentines are pissing and moaning about pollution from the plant and they really need to get their own house in order rather than stupidity like closing borders and staging big media event protests to get feel-good coverage on Cronica, the cable news station that's indispensable in Argentina for a steady diet of news and just plain outrageous spectacle. I've writen about it before.
Without the constant exposure to Spanish, I'd not be able to follow it anymore and it would be a shame to allow all those new synaptic connections to atrophy. I had a couple of really important situations this week where the language came in handy - I helped a friend translate her CV* from Spanish to English for a job she really wants. I also had to have a difficult conversation with a total stranger, a Colombian who's got that coveted legal USA residency. It was a conversation about a difficult and painful matter and being able to communicate with him and let him express himself in his native language. I'm not sure if he would have talked quite so much with me had the conversation been entirely in English.
However it's got its comic moments. I was waiting for nasty fast food (I was in a hurry) at Burger King once this year and the ladies behind the counter were loudly talking in Spanish as if it was a secret code. The one lady was confiding in the other that she'd had oral sex with her boyfriend for the first time the night before and the other was giving her pointers about technique. Yeah, I'll have the Whopper value meal with a BIG side order of Too Much Information.
The road warrior gig got replaced by a position with a VERY local company. Seems to be a good group of guys I work with. It's a fantastic career move because it takes my knowledge of linux and allows me to also make use of that arduously-attained MCSE in Windows 2003. And - nearly unheard of in this gigantic urban traffic-clogged sprawl - my commute is like a mile or so. Maybe its even less than that.
I'm contemplating going back to Uruguay to renew my Cédula de Identidad when the expiration comes due. It's the ticket to legal residency in that country - which might be a retirement option. Working there and having a career would be possible but I'd have to live a pretty much bare-bones monastic life without the opportunity for foriegn vacations. Uruguay has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America - but there is no comparison to the economic opportunity available in the US. No, no chance will I stay and live there when I do the renewal. It would be a little vacation - and yet another phase of closure if I do it - during which I provide yet another sample of my fingerprints and spend a few pesos on some paperwork to get another ID card in exchange.
That difference in standard of living can only be improved by that paper plant. I hope that Uruguay and Argentina can resolve their differences. Protection of the environment is absolutely important, but if the project is properly built that economic benefit to their economy will be invaluable. It will provide them with another market for international trade, because right now their economy depends first and foremost on the government's huge payroll and quantity of employees, then on sales of beef and finally tourism.
I spent a wonderful vacation in August with an uruguayan friend showing her around Southern California. We also went to Las Vegas and to the east rim of the Grand Canyon - this is a bus tour available in Vegas and its grueling. You leave your hotel at 6am and return 18 hours later after spending about 3 1/2 hours at the canyon. But the canyon was beautiful and we laughed like hell at groups of Japanese tourists who had acquired a mishmash of western-wear during their vacation. They really weren't trying to look ridiculous, they just didn't know any better.
I did the same stupid thing when I visited France for the first time. I had to buy a beret. Stereotypical French - except the average French citizen has a bluetooth headset in their ear and they most certainly aren't seen in public in a beret of all things. Their military still does it but those guys don't have a choice.
So the whole point of this - my last post was not about closure. It was a way to put off the culture shock of average US life by immersing myself in a dystopian way of life.
