A few milestones:

• We have now lived in Uruguay for a little over a year.
• We have our permanent residency.
• We have local driving licenses.
• We bought a house.
• We adapted the house so we’d be comfortable in it. There are still a few items to address, but they can wait.
• We celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary.
• We’ve had our electric car for over a year.
• In a few days I will (un)celebrate my 70th birthday.
• We’ve made lots of friends, and they’re not all ex-pats.

The year passed too quickly!

There are so many differences to what we are used to that the best thing to do is adopt a true beginner’s mind and leave all your assumptions behind. Even the little things that should be obvious, aren’t. Enough about that. If you plan on joining us, we can fill you in.

We have made a lot of acquaintances and friends. The ex-pat social networks connect you to people and events pretty easily. We’ve met people just because they overheard us speaking English in a store or market. We are definitely not isolated.

This past year we have been busy with the paperwork, adapting the house, and making contacts. Therefore, we haven’t looked around a lot. There are a lot of places to go, some close, and some far: Amethyst mines, hot springs, zoos, an alchemist’s castle, the ravine of the raptors (a loose translation), a Buddhist temple and monastery in the middle of nowhere, and so on. We’re in the middle of winter here and I’m compiling a list of places to visit once the weather is a little nicer, and before the heat and tourists arrive.

So up to now, the most fun I’ve been having is with language. I actually enjoy the process of learning Spanish. My biggest regret is not starting earlier and more intensely once we realized we were going to make this move. After more than a year of focused study, I still can’t understand most of the local speakers. Granted, the Uruguayan dialect is one of the harder ones to understand, and it could be worse. One of my online courses delights in comparing the different dialects of Spanish. We’d be having even more fun if we had moved to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, or some regions of Spain. You can pat yourself on the back for doing well with Duolingo or one of the other online Spanish courses. Those speakers speak clearly, maybe even pause between words, etc. But that’s not real life. Listening to Uruguayan you-tubers who are not trying to teach Spanish is. And there is plenty to listen to. Even with turning on subtitles and slowing down to 75% it’s challenging, but I know that one day I won’t need to do that anymore. Every week a few more pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it’s just a huge puzzle and the picture on the box isn’t very clear.

I still do Duolingo every day for half an hour or so. It does add to my vocabulary and the speakers are getting faster. In addition I aim for about two hours every day listening to Spanish-teaching you-tubers, Uruguayan documentaries, and on-the-street interviews from Uruguayan TV stations. I spend an hour a week with a personal tutor reading out loud to practice my pronunciation and comprehension. The subjects have included gaucho culture, smugglers, eucalyptus farming, cellulose factories (they grind up the eucalyptus trees), amethyst mining, hot springs, citrus farming, state-owned casinos, and others, so I can learn about the country. With another tutor I spend about 90 minutes a week focusing on grammar. The textbook is a grammar from Spain, so we do spend a lot of time noting how things are different not just in Latin American Spanish, but even more so in Uruguay, and then even in Maldonado, the area surrounding Punta del Este! Yikes. No wonder the cover of the puzzle box isn’t helping much.

You can get by OK if you don’t speak Spanish. Punta del Este is a bit of a unicorn for Latin America. As you wander about town, you don’t see so much evidence of the colonial past. You can stay by the hotels, apartments, and shops and usually find someone who speaks English. If not the shopkeeper, then perhaps another customer who is willing to help out. Of course, once you leave the main, modern, built up areas, you’ll see the plazas, the statues to generals with really long names, and other evidence that you are definitely not in Kansas anymore.

While the ex-pat community is not a place to learn Spanish, it is a place where you can meet people from all over the world. They’re not all from the US! There are Canadians, Russians, Lithuanians, South Africans, French, Spaniards, Argentinians, Australians, and others. And Germans. I have now spoken more German here in Uruguay during the last year, than I have in the previous 40+ years. In one of our informal Spanish classes there are several native German speakers with varying levels of English fluency. Having a conversation and translating in three languages is fun, at least for me! And at some of the gatherings there have been some French speakers who I could eavesdrop on.

Here are a few pictures. I didn’t take enough “before” pictures of the house, but you can see some of the big changes such as the driveway and installation of the pool. You may wonder, with us living just a few blocks from the beach, why would we need a pool? Well, for one, the sea water is cold! Our pool is heated. Eventually we will sell the house and a pool enhances it’s value. With the yard work we’re planning, it was better to put it in now rather than wait.

We put a cover over the back patio and added some shades on the high windows. The sun shines directly into the windows, which is great for warming the house in the winter, but not so good during the summer. The plants along the back fence will eventually block that view, and there will be more in the yard by the street to create a bit more privacy and soften that view from the street.

When we were living in Oregon, I was always impressed by the view of a snow-topped Mount Hood, visible from almost all over town, and the dense old-growth forest. Here, driving through town, you often see the beach and ocean waves of in the distance, sometimes in two directions due to being on a peninsula. While I’d rather see Mt Hood, it’s still pretty impressive in it’s own right. I never thought I’d be living in a seaside town that looked toward Africa.

Well, that’s it for now, more to come as we continue this adventure.

Keep your oars in the water, The Management!