I’ve
mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods. Meat is salted, but not marinated, before
roasting or broiling over the fire. When
we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this
generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of
almost 3 million inhabitants. According
to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants
in town now. Roma-Tijuana seems to serve
Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found. Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to
the Italian-Uruguayan palate. The salsa
was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include
enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>. La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican
food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted
like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the
same web site as the previous restaurant review.
After
Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or
less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very
lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming. Fortunately we had by then made friends with
several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo. One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when
we admitted to craving Mexican food.
When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday
at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for
gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine. “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada
sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.
He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to
spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at
the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large
expatriate community.
Dinner that
night was a choice of chicken or cheese (con permiso, pollo o queso) enchiladas
(or both) in a red sauce, fresh salsa, a bowl of jalapeno peppers to munch,
rice, beans, and roasted chicken in a mole sauce. Our host, Luke, a Colorado native, was the
Assistant Director of a multinational NGO (Non-Government Organization) based
in The United Kingdom that did something important with regard to international
mining. We’ve exchanged occasional
Christmas cards since then and he moved to London, England for his work. Elaine spent much of our remaining time in
Montevideo trying to fix him up with one of the many attractive Uruguayan
ladies she worked with as an Occupational Therapist while we were there.
Luke also
participated in a couple of other quirky experiences with us while we were
there. As an international V.I.P. he was
invited to U.S. Embassy parties for distinguished visitors to Montevideo. As a visiting Fulbright Professor, so was
I. We first met Luke at one of these
parties, hosted by the Ambassador, celebrating the visit of one of the
astronauts, Franklin Chang-Diaz,
to Uruguay as a Public Relations investment by NASA. The party featured boring speeches (except by
the guest of honor, a native Spanish speaker born in Costa Rica, who gave an
interesting bilingual talk), excellent wine (French, Californian, and
Uruguayan), very good hors d'oeuvres, good booze, and lots of dressed-up people celebrating a
local happening.
The social stratification was
interesting: most of the guests from
other embassy staffs clustered around their ambassadors in groups speaking
their native language. This included the
U.S. embassy staff that mixed minimally, if at all, with their visitors. If the party was designed to promote
international understanding and informal exchanges of ideas between the
diplomats and their staffers in Montevideo, it failed miserably unless the
social intercourse took place behind closed doors. We Fulbrighters were no exception; most of us
stood around in a cluster talking to each other, somewhat intimidated by the
atmosphere of apartheid between the various national groups. Luke was an exception as he floated between
groups, seemingly at ease in four or five different languages. I never did find out what the party was all
about. Maybe it was just to celebrate
the astronaut’s presence in Montevideo and to show off our space program. Maybe it was just our ambassador’s turn to
host the social calendar for dozens of embassies and consulates in
Montevideo. Maybe a lot of important
meetings occurred out of sight in the bathrooms and bedrooms. Maybe Luke carried secret messages from group
to group? Quien sabe?
Finally, we
met every few weeks to walk on The Ramblas, alongside the beaches of the Rio de
la Plata, which marked the southern boundary of Montevideo. This was winter in the southern third of the
Southern hemisphere, so it was cold and humid most of the time. The excuse to tale a walk was usually a
sighting of the sun. The walk the
evening took us further downtown than usual, all the way to the big park on the
river. Eventually we came to a large, deserted
amusement park. Luke explained this was
a major destination in the summer for Montevideo families and teenagers for a
number of reasons. You could have fun
here. You could also find privacy here,
something not so easy to do in densely populated, urban Montevideo, where
children tended to live in apartments with Mom, Dad, and siblings until they
were married, and sometimes even after marriage. Most young adults couldn’t afford to buy an
apartment, which usually sold for about the price of a house in the United
States. Apartments are sold, not rented,
in most of South America, so it takes a lot of money to become independent
while growing up.
Of course
we found a few couples having fun at the amusement park even though it was
winter and drizzling. Luke seemed to
have a knack for finding couples necking (and worse) in the park. Or maybe there were so many couples there
that finding them was inevitable. Remember
the privacy problem. It reminded me of
dating in the dorms when I was an undergraduate at The University of
Wisconsin. Madison is much, much colder
than Montevideo, so the search for privacy was more extreme. Even the logistics of necking are different
when it’s 20 degrees below zero. If you
had a car (which most young adults in Montevideo don’t unless they have a high
salaried job with a large multinational corporation), you had another solution
in Wisconsin, but few if any have the car, either as undergraduates at Wisconsin or in Montevideo.
No comments:
Post a Comment