Honoring Diversity is Honoring Life

Happy Solstice Everyone,

 

While today is the first day of Winter for most of you reading this, it is the first day of Summer for us down here in the Southern Hemisphere.  We've been in Montevideo almost a week now and have had a pretty relaxing time.  While Sean hasn't been feeling his best this week, I've enjoyed just relaxing and having some down time.  The weather has been really nice all week with highs in the low to mid 80's and plenty of sunshine.  Today is actually the first day it's been cloudy.  Even though Montevideo is a city of about 1.3 million people, it really feels much smaller because it not nearly as busy and congested as other big cities I've been to.  From the casual dress to the pedestrian-friendly drivers, people in Montevideo are much more laid back than other South America countries.  Flip flips are much more common here, people like to just hang out with friends just drinking in the plaza, and traffic actually stops to let you cross the street, even at uncontrolled intersections.  People are also more friendly, especially coming from Buenos Aires, and are more patient with you trying to speak Spanish, even though a lot of people seem to speak basic English quite well.  Perhaps their pleasant nature is due to all the mate, which is more of a national obsession than a national drink.  People literally carry their mate gourds and thermoses everywhere.  In Argentina, you would see people sitting in the park, or workers in a shop, drinking mate, but not drinking it just walking down the street, day or night, the way you see here.  It's quite nice though. I've enjoyed the city, the beaches are nice, and they have a really popular boardwalk that wraps around a large part of the waterfront. 

 

Motorcycles: Montevideo has a very different motorcycles-to-scooter ratio than other cities we've visited in South America.  Most cities are dominated by scooters, but here, motorcycles are much more common, although you still see more of both than you would in a typical American city.  The motorcycles are cruiser style bikes, mostly with 100 and 125cc engines, so still pretty small compared to the most common bikes back home.  Most of the scooters here seem to have about the same size engine as the motorcycles so I think having a motorcycle versus a scooter is just more of a style preference.  For comparison, especially for those of you who don't know much about bikes, my first bike, a Suzuki GS500, had a 500cc engine, whereas my second bike, a Kawasaki Ninja 650R had a 650cc engine.  I was actually quite surprised and impressed yesterday to see a couple of guys riding the kind of sport bikes you usually see back home.  One had a CBR 600 and the other an R6, both 600cc Japanese sport bikes that cost about $10,000 back in the States.  So if the cost of Japanese bikes are anything like the cost of Japanese cameras here in Uruguay, I don't even want to know what these guys paid for their bikes. 

 

Buildings & Architecture: Our hostel is located on Plaza Independencia, which borders the Cuidad Vieja, which is the city's Old Town.  Cuidad Vieja is full of all these really old impressive buildings, some of them huge, with all sorts of intricate architectural details but sadly in various states of crumbling and disrepair.  A lot of the old buildings are abandoned and just looking at them, one can just imagine what the city must have looked like a hundred years ago.  We've walked around this section of the city a few times and have taken pictures of some of the buildings and plazas which you can see in the Photo Album.  The one attached to this posting is the front entrance of the old, abandoned train station near the port.  Being from Detroit, I'm quite used to seeing beautiful old abandoned buildings that are just too expensive to tear down.  I think the Hudson's Building in downtown Detroit sat abandoned for 15 years before they finally brought it down, which you can actually watch on video by clicking the link.  It costs a lot of money to maintain older buildings, more money to restore and retrofit them, and sometimes even more money to tear them down.  And every time you tear one of these old buildings down, you're destroying a bit of history, which is often another obstacle to tearing them down in the first place.  How long will my old, abandoned high school building, Cass Tech, remain before they tear it down? 

 

Black Population: Making up about 9% of the population, I believe Uruguay has the largest percentage of people of Black/African descent of all the countries we've visited so far.  Back in it's early history, the Spanish Crown gave Montevideo the right to be the only slave port in the Viceroyalty of la Plata, an area that roughly included present day Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.  So like the States, many, but not all, of the Blacks here are descendants of slaves.  I definitely see more Blacks here just walking down the street and have also noticed quite a few interracial couples and interracial kids.  Most notably, I don't get stares and strange looks here the way I have in other countries simply because there are already plenty of people here who look just like me.  No more zoological exhibit!

 

No Smoking:  Unlike other countries we've visited in South America, smoking is not allowed in any public buildings in Uruguay, including bars and restaurants.  I think this is the first country I've been to outside of the States where you can't even smoke in bars or clubs.  They even had signs at the port when we arrived welcoming you to Uruguay and their smoke-free air.  Argentina had a similar law, but I think bars and clubs were legally exempt there.  Nevertheless, as with Argentina, there are still places here in Montevideo where the staff will ignore the law so long as you smoke in a designated area beyond their view.  Otherwise, going to the bar is just like going to bars in California where you have a lot of people outside smoking, just without the official smoking patio or area.  The nice thing about Montevideo is you can drink alcohol in public on the street.  When I was standing outside the club last night, which is located right on the plaza, there were people who didn't seem to actually be club patrons at all (because the club doesn't allow you to take your drinks outside) standing outside drinking and socializing with other people in front of the club.  Why pay cover and inflated drink prices?  Just stop at the grocery, buy a couple liters and hang out with your friends in front of the club or on the plaza where there are plenty of other people hanging out anyway and you can still hear the music coming from the club.

 

I know most of you find these types of no-smoking laws quite pleasant and think they're a great idea, but I'm sure most of you also know my opinion about such laws and the overreaching hand of governments that focus so much effort on trying to regulate social behavior in order to make you believe they're actually doing something good, but while you happily celebrate how much Daddy Government cares about public health, they squander the wealth taxpayers have entrusted them with, our treasury is raped by their corporate friends and our unregulated financial system collapses.  This is what will ultimately lead to the demise of our republic: people who really, truly, honestly believe the government gives a shit about public health because they enact no-smoking laws, or that the government cares about family because they banned alcohol on the beach, or that the government cares about kids because they won't allow gay marriage or gay adoption.  Do these issues really affect you, your family or your kids in any significant way at all?  Do they affect you, your family and your kids the way losing your job does?  How about losing your home?  Your pension or 41% of your 401K?  Or do these issues just give the government the cover they need to fuck us all over because we're not paying attention, because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves about stuff that, in the grand scheme of things and considering all that's wrong with the world and with governments especially, just doesn't matter.  None of us have gained anything for quite a long time and we've all lost a hell of a lot during the same time period.  But we're angry, and actually MOTIVATED TO ACT by signing petitions, protesting, volunteering, contacting our elected representatives and getting others out to vote because the bar allows people to smoke inside or the state recognizes gay marriage.  It's sad. 

 

Politics & Religion: I would like to note that in 2007, Uruguay became the first Latin America country to recognize same-sex civil unions at the national level.  Behind Canada, they are only the second country in all of the Americas to do so.  Montevideo also has the first monument in Latin America in honor of sexual diversity with an inscription that reads, "Honoring Diversity is Honoring Life.  Montevideo for the respect of all genders, sexual identities and orientations".  We also saw, for the first time in South America, a gay couple making out on a park bench right in the main plaza.  And I saw a male couple spoon-feeding their dog a McDonalds soft serve ice cream cone; you can't get any gayer than that.  While church and state have been officially separate since 1919 in Uruguay, the same is supposed to be true in the United States where we still have a long way to go when it comes to progressive social and human rights issues.  Perhaps Uruguayans are so ahead of everyone else in this area because 23% of Uruguayans "believe in God but without religion" and another 17% consider themselves Atheist or Agnostic.  We are supposed to have a wall of separation between church and state back in the States, but with things like DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) at the national level and California's Prop 8 on the State level, we continue to have serious issues with discrimination, bigotry, injustice and flat out tyranny in our country, all justified by the ridiculous notion that someone else's religious beliefs are somehow threatened by two men wanting to spend their lives together and have the same basic protections that straight couples have.  Unfortunately, with all their tax-exempt money funding various political issues, the Church is still one of the most powerful lobby's in our country and the situation will not change until someone decides to enforce the law and stop them from exploiting their tax-exempt status.  It would also help if, as I said above, we stopped fighting and wasting our time on these issues which are clear and obvious once you remove personal prejudice and religion, and instead focus more of our energy on the real problems our society is facing, the things that really will affect our very way of life and our future as a nation. 

 

Just a few things to think about this holiday season.

 

Fiat Lux!

Ozell