A Quick Update

Just a quick update to keep your appetites sated.

I started Community Service last week, which went well. I was greeted by gasps of awe upon entering the room. Seconds later one of the kids would stand up and point saying, "he's gigantic!" That was pretty cool. A little while later one of the kids decided to get out of his chair, run over and hug my leg. Prompted by the enthusiasm I picked the kid up for a second, for some reason every small child loves being lifted overhead. Of course I spent the next fifteen minutes picking up the rest of the little kids.

I'm big over here, but not giant, but I must be to a small child. Most of the time that was supposed to be spent in small groups doing something structured I just played with the kids. Two in particular were quite animated. Franco, the one who initially stood up and yelled, and Agustin. Highlights: Franco giving me a drawing of the two of us, complete with my horns and all, and for some reason Agustin smelling my leg "Huele muy bien!"

They're about what you would expect from a group of 5 year olds, fun but a lot of work.

I trained a few more times with the soccer team, 3 total now, although only twice with a ball. I'm looking forward to getting into the squad, and I'm officially part of the team now. The game this weekend was a lot of fun and we won 6-2. Picture of me in the uniform(note the size) attached. Pictures from the beach still coming in the future.

As for today, Sunday, I went and got a helado before meeting some friends on the beach. We played a bit of volleyball and hung out for the sunset and what not. I stopped by a Chivito(sandwich with steak, ham, bacon, egg, lettuce, pepper, tomato) place that always smells really good on the way home. It was a religious experience. I think I will try and take the camera next time I go.

Weekend at the Beach

As some of you may know, this past weekend was a long one in Uruguay. Somehow this country missed the memo that Independence Day is every Fourth of July and decided that it should be the 24th of August-weird I know (Thanks Thomas). Now, industrious little exchange students that we are, we capitalized on this book keeping bungle.

The initial plan was Iguazu. If you don´t know what Iguazu Falls is, you probablly should...google it. That said, there were a few complications-primarily that George Dubya Bush and Lula(The President of Brazil, where apparently every name sounds like a soccer player) don´t get along too well. Because of this, American´s have the pleasure of paying about 200 dollars more than anyone else before entering the exotic homeland of Samba, Futebol, and legions of transvestites.

A lot of us didn´t want to pay, as we have a whole continent at our fingertips, Brazil can wait. Now, the ironic(ironical?) twist is that I may end up having to(getting to) go to Brazil to play soccer in October. That will, however, certainly be ´vale la pena´ or worth the hassle in my book. More info on this later.

I´m not entirely sure which of the mad Spanish genius´ came up with the plan, but it was decided that a trip would be made to Rocha. A beach. Now remember, it´s winter here. So we rented a beach house(for about 5 dollars per person per day) and set off.

When we got to Rocha my expectations were immediately exceeded. The beach was awesome and the water was beautiful with some really impressive waves. The house was huge. Think Tuscan villa.

So basically we passed the next few days walking up and down the beaches, climbing up a lighthouse, finding dead penguins on the beach, watching a few guys surfing and a baby walrus(apparently, it looked like a seal to me, but I´m told such things don´t live here, only Walrus´/Walri[if that's not the plural form it should be]) swimming. We played a bit of soccer on the beach, sampled the local nightlife-which was ´about as cool as taking a shower with your dad´, and played a good bit of card games and what not. Oh, and I did the whole Polar Bear thing or whatever and jumped in the water with another American. I may never do that again. All in all, a weekend well spent, and not a lot of money spent.

This really requires pictures, I´ll see what I can do when I get home.

Soccer and the Weekend Plans

So I am now, unofficially, part of the soccer team. Hopefully the paperwork will get done by early next week. What that means is, I've had a chance to break in my new cleats a bit and my feet feel like hell. It also means that I've just been connected to a bunch of young Uruguayans, which is a good thing for sure.

My first impressions of the club came when I went to training last Monday. It just turned out to be running, as they were coming back from a tournament, but everyone seemed to be very nice. The big lankster jumping around hugging people and singing turned out to be the goalkeeper, which didn't surprise me a bit. Always the craziest right?

Wednesday I went to our first game. It was an over-20s game actually, I am eligible to play with the under 20s so I will probablly be doing that with a chance to come on as a sub with the overs if I do well I suspect. The game was really exciting, though the result didn't go our way.

Five minutes in the other team scored a fairly disgusting volley from about 25. Not more than two minutes later our left winger equalized with a snap shot on a bouncing ball to the far post. Early in the second half we take the lead with a golazo of a header from a cross. 2-1 Universidad Catolica. Things were going well until about the 60th minute. My attention faded for a minute, but somehow we let in two goals in 5 minutes, at least one from a defensive error. The rest of the match consisted of us getting fouled or pressuring their goal but to no avail. The boys were heartbroken.

The players here are more passionate, firey latin types and die-hard soccer fans(I'm not sure the two are that far removed). They are also more skilled. The pace of the game is fast, with a lot of pressure, which occasionally leads to some ugly clearances, but overall the quality is quite high, I would like to think this team would beat most D1 teams in the United States.

I got to practice with the squad yesterday, actually about 5 hours ago. Things went pretty well all things considered. The new shoes are being broken in and the field and speed of play took some adjusting. That said, I had a few good plays and not really and bad plays, I was a little slow getting a few passes off but they weren't off the mark and I didn't lose possession much. My defending was a bit weak but oh well. I heard bien Reechaard and a Reechard, a Richard quite a few times so that can't be too bad a sign. I'm looking forward to settling in a bit and hopefully playing on some decent fields. We train 8 am on Wednesday mornings I think on the field where the national champions practice apparently so that should be quite nice.


As I eluded earlier, it's quite early here. I got in fro training last night at 1, got cleaned up and packed up by about 2:30 and it is not 6 a.m. We're going to La Rocha until Sunday then Sunday night is I guess the biggest party night in the year here. Monday is their Independence Day. That's really all for now, chau.

RJ

RJ Luh'daKids

It's been a little while since I've wrote in here, and I have a couple of things I would like to talk about so expect blogs on my sorry excuse for a gym and my first experiences with my soccer team in the near future.
Yesterday marked the beginning of my Community Service endeavors. It's time for RMal to give back to the community. This saga began a few days ago. I had signed up for the community service 'class'-it's a class because(theoretically) we get credit for it, I doubt I will ever see any of those hours on my U.S. University transcript- because it will hopefully provide some sort of learning and talking experience and give me that warm fuzzy feeling we all love so much.
It started with a phone call. First off, I hate phone calls because it's much harder when you can't see theperson's mouth or take some other verbal cues when their speaking in a foreign language. What I get from this phone call is that we have a meeting the following day at noon. This however, would be much to simple, so to make the whole thing a bit more fun they decide to send me an email saying we have a meeting at 11. That's Uruguay for you.
Punctual as always, I decide to show up at 11 which turned out to be a wise choice. We go into a quick debriefing. My project will basically entail playing with young kids at a small school on the outskirts or suburbs of town.Suburbs mean quite a different thing in South America. If you have seen Ciudad de Deus you know what I'm talking about. Much like the favelas of Sao Paolo or Rio de Janeiro, the outskirts of these South American cities seem to bethe poorest parts. No Starbucks in Kilometro 16(where I will be going).
These Uruguayans are clever, they waited until after we were locked into the project to tell us that we willhave to travel an hour by bus to get to our location. The bus ride itself is entertaining, the first time, I expect the appeal to fade quickly. Entertainment is provided by the local derelicts, who get on the bus every second or third stop. One was selling pencils. Don't scoff just yet, these pencils were apparently importedfrom Italy and could BEND. I'm still a bit perplexed as to why I need a pencil that I can form into whateverfun shape I may desire, but whatever. The next two were selling little hard candies, they had much worse salespitches, but looked a bit less like Daniel Day Lewis from There Will Be Blood and had some sort of vaguely usefulproduct and thus actually sold a little. The last guy was my favorite. He actually came on with a guitarand performed a few songs. His skill wasn't noteworthy, but the guy was trying. He actually made a little bitof money and retained a bit of his pride by not staking his fortune on moldable pencils.
As all of this was going on you could notice the scenery slowly changing. The buildings becoming a bit smaller, the paint looking a bit older-think the transition when you start getting into the West Pass Road area. The transition continued though. Eventually, I could tell we were getting close. One of the biggest things I noticed was the litter. Everywhere. The litter and debris were similar to something you would have seen after Huricane Katrina. A little less debris but more litter. The houses themselves, looked like some sort of makeshift shelter. Many of the roofs are pieces of rusted over tin, and the fences as well. There were a lot of horses too. The poor people here, or the garbage people, I'm still unsure about this but I'm not sure thereis a huge difference between the two, use horse drawn chariot/carriages. As a result, I saw more than a fewhorses tethered up by the side of the road out here, which is one of the things I still haven't become accustomed to. So eventually we get to the school and we talk a bit. The lady says something about the kids are goingto love me(the only guy in the group) because many don't have father figures or something. We really don't haveany expectations except to play with the kids and show up consistently. Then we go to see the kids. There are a lot of them. 32 I think. And they are all 4 or 5 years old. They were loud. But they were cute little kids.

• A google search gave me this bit of help:
  What should you expect of children from 4 to 5 years old? Children this age...
  
• Are active and have lots of energy.
• May be aggressive in their play.
• Can show extremes from being loud and adventurous to acting shy and dependent.
• Enjoy more group activities because they have longer attention spans. Like making faces and being silly.
• May form cliques with friends and can be bossy.
• May change friendships quickly.
• May brag and engage in name-calling during play.
• May experiment with swear words and bathroom words.
• Can be very imaginative and like to exaggerate.
• Have better control in running, jumping, and hopping but tend to be clumsy.
• Are great talkers and questioners.
• Love to use words in rhymes, nonsense, and jokes.

I am looking forward to this. I find it a bit entertaining that they speak better Spanish than me. I spellbetter at any rate though, haha. That's all for now.RJ

EDIT:I hate my computer

Another outing into Ciudad Vieja

We went to the Mercado del Puerto this weekend. All in all in what a really cool place, the first kind of "touristy" thing I've done down here (with theexception of taking obnoxious ammounts of photos of mundane things) and probablly one of the most fun outings yet. A pretty good crew of us went downthere, seven people I guess-2 germans, 1 dane, 3 Mexicans, y yo.

The mercado(market) is an interesting little place somewhere between the port and the center of the ciudad vieja(old city). Ciudad Vieja reminds me a lot of the French Quarter, kind of pretty to look at in a dirty way, and kind of unsavory. As one of the Germans put it, "You don't really want to be aroundthe port at night, it's where all the trash settles". The building itself is quite interesting, I have no idea what purpose it served in a past life, itkind of looks like a bombed out train station. A lot of interesting architecture and semi-open aired. This whole place is filled with really big grills. You can grab a bite to eat at the counter around one of the independent little grills, or you can go into one of many restaurants and put food from their grill in your mouth.

We ended up in one of the restaurants, led upstairs to a table by the window. We had a nice view of an old plaza outside and all the gypsy sort of peopleselling their stolen or knock-off goods there. The prices were a bit more expensive than some other places, as it's a tourist trap, but the food is among the best in the city and relatively cheap compared to something of equal quality in the U.S. I had a very good steak, although I should have spent a few more pesos for the 'lomo'(llama?) cut, a caprese salad, and potatoes roquefort for about $25 U.S. This included the tip and the medio y medio theybrought us. Medio y medio is a Uruguayan concotion that was originally only available at the Mercado del Puerto. It's a half and half mixture of dry white wine and champagne. When they brought us out little flutes with the bread I figured it was a complementary sort of thing but I'm pretty sure itpopped up on the check.

The meal was concluded with a long walk down the Rambla/beach/coast and a rousing game of team WAR(RISK) in which my NAFTA Mexican American alliance hadvictory snatched from our hands by the cunning German duo. I don't think I'm even going to touch making a joke there.

That's about it really, it was really fun though and I'm going to watch some tango or something tonight so that should be pretty cool.

Ciao

Naw

I showed up a little early last night to play soccer with that group I played with last week. Some volleyball team had the court before us. Those guys were good. Real good.

The Boliche

Hmmm. It's been a couple of days since I have written anything on here so let's see what we can do.

Friday was our last day of orientation. We took a nice little bus tour of the city, you can see some of the pictures below, and we also took a Spanish placement test. In addition to the tour and tests we got a little sheet of paper telling us that there would be an orientation party in Ciudad Vieja(the remnants of Spain's colonial fortress/city before Montevideo exploded into the medium sized city it is now.) To be honest, everyone was a bit skeptical about the party. I for one, was expecting one of those "meet and greet" things where a bunch of old people would tell us how happy they were that we were in their city eroding their cultural values with our american rock music and clothes. Whatever, we all decided to go, if it turned out to be lame we were in Ciudad Vieja and it wouldn't be hard to find something new.

I was in for two surprised. 1)Hotel Ciudad Vieja was not what I was expecting. When a school rents something out named Hotel Ciudad Vieja I'm thinking it's an old establishment-you gotta get a name like that early on right? I can't actually vouch for the age of the place, but it was much smaller and shoddier than I expected. The food they offered was prepared in a kitchenette, claro?

2)The party was a lot more fun than I expected. There was no faculty present, which was good, just the same students I had been hanging out with the past couple days and a few people staying at the hotel more or less. There were a couple other foreigners who weirded me out a little and I didn't inquire too much about who they were, but I suspect they were exchange students from a previous semester still here.

So we hung out for a while at the hotel. There were three English lads there, 2 from Newcastle and one from...somewhere else, the 3rd guy kind of sucked. The other two were quite funny though and we had some good laughs. They were surprised by my knowledge of 'The Toon", the soccer team from Newcastle upon the Tyne, so that gave me a bit of street cred I think. Our grading system is pretty strange here, it's only used in Uruguay(The rest of the world will catch up soon I'm sure). Basically though, the passing grades have numbers attached to them but we were told not to worry about that, you will either get a 'Bueno','Bueno Muy Bueno','Muy Bueno' or 'Supersaliente'. Now, needless to say I have begun placing everything I can into this scale-think Thomas' "tier-ing phase". That Chivito I just ate? It was good, not great...Bueno Muy Bueno. You get the picture. The Uruguayans don't really get the comedy here, but the English blokes really picked up on it quickly, so there was a lot of Bueno-muy-bueno'ing going on.

The Mexican girls gave me a little crash course on salsa dancing which took me back to my days(can you call one night "days"?) salsa dancing at El Rancho. I'm thinking I need to continue working on this because I have the feeling dancing is much more important in this culture than back home. One of the Austrian girls also introduced me to 'The Waltz' which I don't think will be so useful in Uruguay but whatever.

At some point in the night a classical guitar showed up. I haven't played the one at the house yet because something is wrong with it, so I eagerly embraced this opportunity. This brazilian guy, who was a bit of a creepster but a nice guy, was hammering out some Nirvana tunes. Now, when I say 'hammering out' a mean 'struggling through'. I ask him if I can see the guitar, partly to put an end to his performing and because I'm a bit curious about the classical guitar. I strummed on the thing for a little bit before my new Brazilian friend asks me to sing. Since I speak English I guess I am automatically qualified to perform any American song. As he keeps requesting "Ehh, Pearla Jam, Pearla Jam" I run through Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town. They loved it! I guess it is that easy. As long as you speak English you're set. I then pull out Rocky Raccoon and Coldplay's Dont Panic for the small crowd that has gathered, Don't Panic happens to be one of the English guy's favorite songs so that works out well.

I'm not sure if it was the Patricia(cerveza) the brazilian guy was pounding or the fact that he didn't speak English but they genuinely enjoyed my playing which was pretty cool. My 'set list' is quite short though as I only know a handful of songs all the way through so this didn't last too long. Some German girl I had never met was apparently a singer but couldn't play the guitar. She requested a couple of songs, but I didn't know any of them.
A snippet of the conversation is below:
German: "Aghh, you don't know that? Well, where are you from in the United States"
Me:Mississippi
G:"Oh Mississippi, well how about Uncle Cracker-Follow Me?
Me:Absolutely not
G:"Oh, you should know that, you are from Mississippi"

uhhhhh...

At this point it's about 4 a.m. and the little party is dying down so we decide to go to the Disco. Actually, that needs to be rephrased, the people I am sharing a taxi with decide to go to the Disco. I'm ready to go to mi cama. So we roll up to the Disco, which had a cover fee which sucks. Guys have to pay twice as much as girls, which really sucks. Luckily Uruguay's economy kind of sucks so it wasn't very steep.

Uruguayans use the words boliche or disco, but apparently this is Spanish for fire hazard. The place is quite dark with a few strobe lights going off, packed wall to wall with small, sweaty Uruguayans. It is, needless to say, quite different from anywhere in Oxford. We quickly head upstairs to the sort of wraparound balcony where we bump into the English blokes. We exchange Bueno Muy Bueno's briefly. The experience as a whole was fairly entertaining, except for the intermittent fog machine bursts. Apparently disorienting fog in a hot, crowded place is someone's idea of fun? We return home some time around 6 am, incredulous after our taxi driver tells us they don't really have 24 hour restaurants in Uruguay. Really Uruguay? Your clubs stay open until 8 in the morning but you can't find a bite to eat? Someone is dropping the ball here. I will be writing an email to the Waffle House corporate office shortly.

Got to run now, I'll have a short post up about my first days of classes up soon. The search for a gym and the quest to get on a soccer team continue, but I feel I am making some progress.

Hasta Luego

Some Photos

I should have another blog up in the next 48 hours or so on my weekend, and first day of class is tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled for that. For now though, I thought I would just upload a few of my favorite pictures that I have taken thus far.

View from high up on a hill far from the center of the city, I live a little to the right of where this is, across the water though and about 1/2 mile down the coast probablly. (you can see some little kids playing soccer in the middle ground)

A guard at the General Artigas statue

General Artigas. Uruguyuan George Washington I guess.

This was some little statue in a park on the beach. From the city tour we took.
Another picture on the walk home
Where I sleep at night

Panorama of the city from the same location as the picture earlier