Life after the mundial...

Well everything is settling back into a routine of essentially: wake up, go to work, eat, finish working, walk home, talk to people and sleep. One of the most apt exclamations I have heard since the mundial, that accurately describes the sentiment right now is "Qué vamos a hacer sin fútbol?" "What are you we gonna do without soccer?". And it's basically the truth, as I enter the last month of my stay in Uruguay, things seem to be winding down - with many of my friends taking winter break and going back to their home provinces in the interior, leaving me with my electric fish.

On the up side, my Spanish has suddenly drastically improved. I managed to decipher something that sounds like "Kéntacá" to "Quién está acá" (Who's here). There were many instances in which I was surprised that I could understand given the speed of their speech. Finally, after 2 months, I am truly catching on...

As some random information about the culture here, I am not really fond of their food. True I like the increased meat consumption, but one would expect their to be many different preparations of the meat with different spices common to Latin America. But instead, I find that most of their food is either fried meats (milanesas), meat with pasta in a tomato-based sauce, or meat with bread (like sandwiches, tortas, hamburguesas), or carne asado. When some people were cooking food for a group of people (including me), I found out that they were terribly intolerant to spicy foods. They made a pizza with barbeque sauce, which by all measures is not spicy to the American/Arizonan palette. But here, almost everyone complained about how it needed to be less spicy in the future. But no one can blame them especially with the typical foods they eat. I spoke with them about how life is more exciting with spicy foods like curry - and so they bought me a pack of curry. Now I'm in charge of enlightening their taste buds...

And I never realized this, but they are very conscious about being compared to Argentinians. Because Uruguay is almost always eclipsed by the culturally and linguistically similar Argentina (haha if one of my Uruguayan friends reads this, I'll probably get lectured), they really hate being associated with them. To Uruguayans, Argentina is like their ugly stepsister who thinks she's better than everyone.

On 18 de Julio (Artiga's bday and the Uruguayan Fathers Day), I had lunch with my mentor (mi padre uruguayo) and his family. Because of my improved Spanish, I am able to talk more and it was a good experience.