cortes bovino

[thank you, Matt, & the Uruguayan butcher shop that hung this poster]

"cuts of beef for provisioning"

Matt says:

I thought you might find this useful. I took a picture of it in a grocery store (pardon the glare).

It seems to be different than the terms used in Argentina, but it has been helpful for me over here tracking down the particular cuts of meat I'm looking for.

The one thing missing is that entrecot seems to be another term for a boneless rib roast.

tiny houses

Who will build a tiny house? Why not visit Tiny House Blog for ideas?

Today, THB's featured home is located in Uruguay, slightly rundown, Matt, but worth a look?

might be dug up & put on a truck . . .

I don't know how tiny a house needs to be to be classified as tiny, but under 500 square feet (approx. 50 square meters) makes sense to me.

To live in a container that you could buy & ship straight to your lot, check out ecopods:

an ecopod container house

If you'd rather live in a sphere or install a sphere for your treehouse, visit freespiritspheres:

a sphere house

You could even build your house from a whisky vat or a glider:

converted Horsa glider

Check out Tiny House Blog's photo gallery for more ideas.

Philip Morris vs Uruguay

[excerpt from Emily Dugan @ The Independent, 29 May 2011]

The unstoppable march of the tobacco giants

How the industry ruthlessly exploits the developing world - its young, poor and uneducated

When countries in these emerging markets try to clamp down on tobacco, the battle often ends up in the court room. In Uruguay, for example, the government had been leading the way under President Tabaré Ramón Vázquez Rosas, a former oncologist. In 2006 it became the first in the region to ban smoking in public places and now it wants 80 per cent of every pack of cigarettes to be taken up with health warnings.

In response, Philip Morris has sued the government. It is thought that the company will demand at least $2bn in damages if Uruguay loses.

Read the entire article here.

Vik

Estancia Vik & Playa Vik are luxury art hotels, two more reasons to visit Uruguay.

Also, don't miss Vik Holistic Vineyard in Chile.

Some pix of Estancia Vik.

parilla & dining room

living room

bathtub

GPS in Argentina

Greg Utas offers this information about using a Garmin GPS in Argentina:

I took my Garmin 255W to Argentina and it worked great. Very useful for driving around the city of Salta. The maps were loaded onto a small memory card that goes into a slot on the side of the Garmin. I ordered a preloaded card from travelbygps.com.

You can download the maps yourself, but for $20 I didn't want to spend time on it. The maps also include Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

Not everything went smoothly. My 12V (cigarette lighter) adapter would often fall out when driving over a bump. You can imagine the hassle, so I travelled around Salta in search of a new adapter. Marc Chagall, located at Florida 11 in the pedestrian mall area just south of the Hotel Alejandro I, had a 12V adapter with a USB port. They also had a USB cable to plug into this port, one with the right connector for the Garmin at the other end. This adapter could still fall out, but twisting a car key under the spring clips widened their grip to the point where they would hold.

The maps don't know about La Estancia's roads yet, apart from the southern service road. And a couple of times, they wanted to send me the wrong way down a one-way street. So pay attention.

On 2 April 2011, Jeremy commented: You can find Garmin-compatible maps of Argentina and Uruguay at www.proyectomapear.com.ar. It's free, by the way, and it works.

the phantom left

[from Jacobo Timerman's Chile: Death in the South, tr. Robert Cox, Vintage, 1987]

The terrorists of the extreme left in Uruguay (Tupamaros), in Argentina (Montoneros), and in Chile (MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left) based their strategy on the achievement of one objective: to make themselves feared as an organically structured army and to appear as an alternative to the military. They realized this objective in the minds of the great majority of the officer corps in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. The intelligence services and the military commanders, to be sure, knew the truth about these phantom guerrilla armies. They nevertheless encouraged the belief that the phantom armies were real, so as to gain support for the conspiracy to stage a coup. In every Latin American coup officers with a vocation for politics play a major role. These officers are precisely those in the intelligence services and those who dominate the high commands. All the intelligence wings of the armed forces in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile knew perfectly well that none of the guerrilla groups had the remotest possibility of constituting an alternative to the military.

So convinced were these terrorists who aspired to be guerrillas that their image was more important than the organization, and even more important than training and supplies of arms, that in some cases they invented imaginary actions they asserted they had carried out. They also claimed responsibility for actions initiated by other groups. The Argentine Montoneros maintained that they had "executed" a police chief and his wife when, in fact, the two were murdered by the chief's rivals in the police force. They attacked a barracks, Monte Chingolo, even though they knew that the army was ready and waiting for them to strike. The result was an impressive massacre of civilians who were caught in the cross-fire.

The pseudo-guerrillas of the left in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina had also convinced themselves – like a neurosis that feeds on itself – that they represented an immovable obstacle in the path of the military and that they would be able to prevent a coup. They did not avert the coup, they did not even delay it – nor did they provoke it. In all three countries there were other motives for the armed forces' taking power – the guerrillas merely provided another pretext. What the violent left did accomplish, however, was to grease the wheels of the killing machine. They wanted to cause panic in the armed forces in order to paralyze them, but the panic they created in the officer corps was just enough to set in motion the most awful killing machine that has been experienced in any of the three countries in the course of this century.

The inexplicable homicidal extremism that took hold among the military in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina is the other side of the coin to the declamatory extremism of the revolutionary left in those countries. The terrorists attacks never posed any danger to the existence of the state or the survival of the armed forces. The insistent declamation began with Commandante Ernesto Ché Guevara in Bolivia, when he forecast "many Vietnams" in Latin America. It reached its height with the blessing Juan Perón gave to the Argentina Montoneros. He made them believe that in every country there was more than one army and that the new army, the guerrilla army, would soon replace the professional armed services.

In general, a political force will always seek to magnify the danger posed by the enemy. It will try to demonstrate that there is not merely danger ahead but that the very existence of society is at stake. Hitler perfected this mechanism with the Jews; Stalin used it against the old Bolsheviks and the dissidents. In a way, although within the limitations set by a democratic society, Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to do the same in the United States.

Yet with the left-wing extremists in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina exactly the opposite happened. They tried to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were. They boasted of their omnipotence, they exaggerated their operational capacity, they intellectualized their phobias, proclaiming a revolutionary military strategy. It was nothing more than a tale told by an idiot. But it was sufficient to motivate the armed forces, themselves victims of the manipulation of their own intelligence services, and it drove them to commit the first acts of genocide in this century in the three most civilized societies of Latin America: Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina.

Uruguay: "little, cosy country"

[from Merco Press, 27 January 2011]

Let’s stop Fooling Around and Spending so Much on Arms Says Uruguayan President Mujica

The President of Uruguay Jose Mujica, on Wednesday concluded a two-day visit to Peru aimed at deepening trade and political relations. His next official port of call is Venezuela.

Mujica's visit to Peru was the first by a Uruguayan head of state in 25 years. In a government statement, Peruvian president Alan Garcia said it was “worth waiting” to receive a representative from such an “example of democracy, education and peace.”

Mujica met with Garcia to sign bilateral accords on ports, migration, health and education.

Mujica was awarded the Grand Collar of the Order El Sol del Peru, the highest distinction awarded by the Peruvian State, in a ceremony at the Salon Dorado at government house.

Trade between Peru and Uruguay is currently worth about $94 million, with Peru exporting $21 million worth of fish and wool. Peruvian imports, worth about $73 million, include rice, maize and meat.

The Lima Chamber of Commerce, where Mujica spoke, noted that Uruguay is a major software exporter in Latin America and said the countries could work together on boosting trade of goods and services.

During his speech Mujica thanked García for inviting him and talked about the relations between the two countries.

“Uruguayans are friendly people, in Uruguay you have the freedom to say what you want and live freely. We also have defects like everybody else, but we live in peace,” Mujica said.

On his part Garcia said, ”I propose that Pepe (Jose Mujica) lift the flag on behalf of democratic Uruguay, to become a partner on lifting the banner of peace and disarmament among our South American countries,” “Our countries need resources to help the people who are in poverty,” he added.

“I am going to take your remarks into careful consideration,” said Mujica. “Let’s stop fooling around and spending so much money on arms when we have to spend a lot of money on other things and we owe so much to poor people who have been forgotten and ignored,” he added.

Mujica, as always, was dressed informally, showed how humble he is. “I don’t deserve all this fuss, the pigeons in the square are scared,” he joked, referring to the main square in Lima where “parts of our scars, glory, frustrations and pain of the fatherland are yet to be fulfilled,”

The Uruguayan leader said that his country and Peru should improve their relationship and invited Peruvians to move to his “little, cosy country, which is almost empty and has very fertile land.” He said it is time for Peru to send business people and people “to live” and not just “third world seamen, exploited by Asian ships; and maids, even though they are honourable and docile.”

During his visit, Mujica said one of his aims was to push for the entry of Peru and Venezuela into the Mercosur trading block which includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

Uruguay: no tax on foreign residents

good news about Uruguay:

"no taxes on assets owned abroad by foreign residents of Uruguay"