Uruguay – The Adventure Begins
Moving to Uruguay
For pictures and information about our initial visit in January, see the previous posting here.
Alright, so we decided to move to Uruguay. We sold the house, we arranged for all sorts of documents that would be needed for establishing permanent residency, got rid of most of our stuff, and packed the rest to be shipped.
April 21 – Movers came to pack up what little was left to be shipped.
April 22 – Last meal at the house on Myrtlewood. We moved to an AirBNB to await our one-way flight on the 25th. In the meantime we made some last visits and sold our car.
Our Stay in Montevideo (MVD)
We arrived in Uruguay on the morning of April 26. We rented a car ahead of time, and then realized it wouldn’t hold all our luggage, so we rented a mini-van for one day and swapped out to our regularly-scheduled rental the next day. That ended up being a Peugeot 208 automatic. Not a bad little car. In January we drove one with a manual transmission, since the automatics had all been rented due to the season. While I’m comfortable with a manual transmission, the combination of adjusting to the local traffic, and an anemic engine, convinced me to get an automatic this time. We rented the Peugeot for a while and then switched to a VW ID.3 all-electric.
We stayed in Montevideo for 5 weeks to be close to the offices where we would take care of administrative/bureaucratic tasks needed to apply for permanent residency. Our residence in Montevideo was at La Toscana Residences, just east of the airport. This was in a gated community consisting of modern houses and some apartment buildings for short-term stays. There was a lot of shopping and several car dealerships close by. Between attending to appointments in town we tested several different electric cars. Some conversations with sales reps were via Google translate on our phones. Interesting, it got the job done to do a test drive, but not to the point I would complete such a significant purchase that way.
Moving to Punta del Este (PDE)
Our timing for moving to PDE worked out well. Several days before our move the last essential task (getting a bank account) in Montevideo was finished. Now it’s just a matter of letting bureaucracy grind away. Meanwhile, we’ll be in PDE looking for a permanent residence, most likely a house.
Our new location is an apartment right in the middle of town, not far from shopping and close to where we’ll be looking for houses. This will be our home base for up to 6 months. By then we’ll need to have a permanent home, or we’ll have to find a new rental outside the tourist zone because the rent goes up 4X (!) due to the tourist season.
Cars
Renting a car isn’t cheap for the long term, so we started looking at cars as soon as we had time in MVD. Our target was a small, all-electric vehicle. Parking, driving on narrow roads, and gas prices were the main motivations. After renting the gas car for four weeks we switched to an electric to get a feel for what it would be like. The VW ID.3 we got was nice, with lots of power and good suspension, not something we would buy ourselves, but good for practice. We got phone apps for charging from the two main vendors. You put in your credit card information, and when you are ready to charge the car you scan a QR code and proceed. The apps give you a map of local charging stations, and if you select one it tells you if it’s busy or not, along with the connector type, and if you have to bring your own cable.
We tested several cars, one European, and five different Chinese brands and models. Common features are advanced electronics and driver-assists, good acceleration, and automatic transmissions. We settled on the JAC S3 Ytterby in white. That wasn’t our first color choice, but it was in stock from a dealer who spoke English. It’s also not as comfortable as I would like since a bit of self-pretzeling is required for me to get in it. But it will serve for now. Once we understood the buying process it was pretty straightforward:
- Decide on a car and get an invoice.
- Dealer forwards car info to an insurance broker.
- Go to insurance broker and get a policy, who forwards info back to dealer.
- Go to bank and get a check.
- Bring check back to dealer.
- Dealer calls back next day when car is ready. Dealer has arranged for license plates and paperwork so we don’t have to deal with it.
- We pick up the car and drive off. We have to drive both cars to the local car rental office to return the rental. Timing worked out well so we returned the rental on the current return date without having to extend the rental period (again).
- Titles don’t automatically come with the car(!?). That is a separate charge (US$500 in this case) and takes several weeks to be arranged by a notary (escribano). Having it will make it easier to sell the car later on.
- Let apartment reception know our new license plate number so the entry gate will recognize us.
In a little over 24 hours we bought a car. The 200-page user manual is in Spanish only and will give me a lot of practice with technical terms.
Pictures
Here is a slide show of some pictures, which includes the project brain map, the location of our shipping container at the time of this post, and a map showing our current home. You should maximize the slide viewer (in the top left corner) to properly appreciate the pictures. All were taken with Galaxy S23 5G phone.
Observations
Most cars have a manual transmission. This is obvious when you are on a hill at a stop light. When it turns green, they all rollback a little as the clutch and accelerator are engaged.
There are a LOT of electric cars. Most are from China, some costing less than US$20,000. There are some from Europe, and a tiny handful from the US. Most gas stations and shopping centers have a charging station.
Most coffee comes in thimbles, or at least it seems that way. Starbucks sells coffee in “normal” sizes.
Of US franchises, McDonalds, Burger King, Subway and Starbucks are the only ones we’ve seen so far.
I was looking for alcohol as a solvent and antiseptic. Normally I would get 75% or 99% isopropyl, or rubbing, alcohol. I did find an alcohol in the grocery store, next to the bandaids. Upon fully reading and understanding the label I discovered that it’s 95% ethanol, essentially the same thing as Everclear®! At US$5.60 for almost a quart. Okay, well they do sell liquor in the grocery store. Again, think European model, where they don’t make such a big deal about drinking alcohol. I still need to find isopropyl though, since ethanol doesn’t dissolve stickum.
Driving is an organic process. I mentioned this in the January post, but it became much clearer when we had to navigate the roads in the center of Montevideo. Taxi and Uber drivers must be in touch with some special driving spirit, or at least be very chill. Lane markers are mere suggestions, and motorcycles seem to go wherever they fit. Some rules are followed: (Almost) nobody goes through red lights, nobody turns right on red, and zebra stripe crosswalks give pedestrians the right of way. And there is no leeway when it comes to blood alcohol and driving. 0.0% is the limit.
There are a lot of cameras. They’re also smart, at least when it comes to reading license plates. When you get your parking ticket at a pay lot, it prints your tag number on the ticket. When you leave the mall or airport, you pay at a kiosk. Then, when you drive out, the cameras recognize you and open the gate without you needing to stick the ticket into a slot. I haven’t done a lot of paid parking in the US recently so this may be typical, but here is where I encountered it for the first time. Pretty cool.
A lot of houses use wood stoves as supplemental, if not primary, heating. Even modern, high-end homes. And almost every home has a serious barbecue area. The apartment has several party rooms that include a barbecue pit large enough to roast at least an entire pig. As a result, you find wood lots scattered about. Even in-town Montevideo there were small plots piled high with firewood. The grocery stores sell wood pellets for use in pellet stoves. While shopping at a Sodimac (the local home improvement chain) I recently saw a micro-car being filled to the brim with bags of wood pellets. Winter is coming down here.
Speaking of winter, the noon sun is in the North, not the South.
Aside from the pile of suitcases we brought with us, we are also shipping some household items by boat. There is a ship tracking web site that shows the current location of our boat and it’s fun to watch. It doesn’t show the complete historical track at once, just the track from the most recent port. I can see the boat bouncing along the coast from port to port, and sometimes backtracking. It just got through the Panama Canal. If you look at the canal with Google Earth, you can see it’s not a simple passage.
Social Scene
So far, the local expat group is providing contacts. The group meets monthly at a restaurant for several hours, and has members from all over the world. It’s a starting point to get linked to other people. There’s nothing, so far, like the UU church we attended in Gresham, which provided us with such a nice community of friends.
Spanish
I know, you all want to know about the greatest hurdle at the moment, and probably for a while: learning Spanish. Well, we certainly should have gotten serious about this sooner. There are a lot of resources for learning Spanish. Apps, videos, websites, etc. Most are free. I’ve been dabbling with Duolingo for a few years, and I did study some Spanish in high school and college, so I have a little head start over SJ. Also, English is my second language, after German. I studied French for six years and I enjoy studying linguistics as a hobby. For now I will continue with online resources and watching television. SJ is using online resources and working with some tutors. Other than building a useful vocabulary, listening comprehension is the hardest part. We can formulate a somewhat comprehensible question, however the response is frequently a burble, not too dissimilar to the sound a stream makes when flowing over some smooth rocks. Apparently, after Japanese, Spanish is the second fastest-spoken language. Watching Spanish-dubbed Discovery Channel isn’t too bad, I can make out most of the words and can get the gist of it since many of the technical and scientific terms have Latin and Greek roots common to English. And there are many pauses. But listening to a local TV news show can be challenging, especially when they interview a local resident! In any language, there are people who can talk continuously without taking a breath. When it’s in a foreign language, you really need pauses every now and then so you can process. I have not noticed any significant progress yet, but I assume one day I’ll be surprised to actually understand what the cashier at the grocery checkout is asking me 🙂
Well, that’s it for now, more to come as we continue this adventure. Cheers!