Unlike the US where there are natural gas pipes leading to the houses, here in Uruguay people use big refillable tanks. Our stove and portable heater both have their own tanks. When they run out, as happened last night, there's a number you can call to get a replacement. The amazing thing is how fast the replacement comes. Today they showed up within about 10 minutes of when i called. They have a dispatcher like a taxi dispatcher who you call, and that person directs the trucks which are always driving around the city to stop off at your house. The guy runs from the truck with the heavy tanks, hits the doorbell, changes the tank in the heater, gets the money and runs back to the truck. It's amazingly efficient. In other parts of latin america the natural gas trucks just drive around the city making a very loud metal clanging sound and you have to flag them down.
While i'm on the subject of home delivery and Uruguay, there's a dvd delivery service too. It's not quite as slick. There is no truck full of dvd's prowling the city waiting for an online order. Rather they do one delivery run a night. So you order and they drop by the dvd about 9pm that night. The problem is, the next night at 9pm they come by looking to pick up the dvd. If you aren't home, you've got to pay for a second night. They don't do deliveries on sunday, so if you rent saturday you get to kept the dvd until monday night. The main advantage isn't really the delivery, but the selection, see, not that many people have dvd players so the selection at any given video store is quite limited. We don't have a video or tv, so we use my ibook to watch movies, but it means that we can't rent from the much wider selection of cassettes. DVD's are nice for the language subtitles. We keep the audio in the first language if it's english or spanish, and put the subtitle in the other language. That way we both can follow along with a mix of reading and listening.
Posted by rabble at July 9, 2003 12:16 PM