On moving in Uruguay

The experience of moving in Uruguay is distinctly different from moving the US. About six months ago we were seriously looking at moving to a different apartment. Ours was damp, got no light, had hugely high ceilings, and a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. We found plenty of apartments which were listed for rent, but we couldn’t rent any of them. The problem wasn’t money, we had plenty by Uruguayan standards and the price of rent has dropped so we’d be paying less for a better place. The problem was el contracto, the lease. It seems that because of quirks in the housing market, or perhaps the glut of apartments and houses for rent, there is a universal requirement of a 2 year lease. We were able to talk people down to a one year option, but that was still more time than we could commit to. So we stayed in the dark, dank apartment on Brandzen in Cordon.

Now we’re going to be leaving Uruguay for a while. Going first to Nueva York en Estados Unidos, then to India. If we had a great apartment we might have sublet it, but it wasn’t. The result was giving up the apartment and packing everything up. In the middle of packing, we found out that we had to go to Buenos Aires for several days to prove that Gaba exists and that she was really born.

My opinion has always been that when moving, it’s a chance to shed unwanted possessions which have come to occupy my life. Gaba hasn’t moved as many times, so she doesn’t hold this belief. We had a bit of a struggle over how much to save.

For weeks a topic of conversation is to whom to loan out our stuff. The couches, water heater, oven, dining room table, beds, blankets, posters, books, zine collection, washer and dryer, and fridge all ended up with relatives or friends. A couple neighbors came over to help out, in part to help, but in part to get first dibs on what family and close friends didn’t take.

Anything we didn’t want, we put out on the street. The amazing thing was how fast things disappeared. We’d put a pile of mixed trash or other things we didn’t want in the street and there would be somebody picking through it within minutes. We had some people stop to ask when would be the best time to come back for the rest of what we were throwing out.

It was nothing like the abundance of the Pioneer Valley where i went to school, where at the end of the semester there would be piles of slightly used clothing, computers, couches, and other discarded consumables. Then i was one of the people going around looking for clothing, a ‘new’ couch, a computer to recycle for some activist project. Now in Uruguay, it’s the reverse, i’m saying that we need to get rid of these things.

The quality level of what is acceptable for reuse is completely different. Here, in Montevideo, people see everything as a chance to avoid having to spend money they don’t have. The ferrias, street markets, are lined along the edges with people who have laid out the most random things they hope to sell. Random pieces of metal, broken computer parts, used telephone cards, ripped clothing, what ever thing that might bring in some money.

One of the things we send on to relatives was several boxes of household goods. A dozen kilos of rice, 10 packets of chocolate milk, half a dozen jars of instant coffee, a big box of soap, and 5 bottles of detergent. Gaba’s mom used to work in a hospital and she received a part of her salary in food and household goods. It wasn’t until we moved that i figured out WHY there was so much of those things. When i was in Bangkok it made sense that we might need 10 kilos of rice on hand at at any given time. The word for ‘meal’ literally means to ‘eat rice’. But Uruguayans don’t eat much rice. Personally I only managed to make my way through a couple kilos in 6 months.

I suppose getting a salary in rice is better than not getting a salary at all. That’s the case with many workers here, especially in the hospitals and schools. People have a job, but they don’t get paid. Or if they do get paid it comes late if at all. Right now the workers of the second largest paper in Uruguay, the center-left La Republica, have occupied their offices and stopped printing of the paper to demand a union contract and that their salaries be paid. The owner says that they don’t need a union, and that paying late salaries is ok because the paper is not making a profit. Maybe the reporters can be given packets of free press releases to supplement their salary.