Dear reader I gave the destination when booking the taxi the night before. Seven o’clock in the morning we made it for. It was a 25 minute drive but I thought: better safe than sorry. The driver showed up at 7 am as agreed. He would have been in his late 60s, spoke English, but when he asked if I was going to Canberra airport I knew there had been a lack of communication. No, to X suburb, which is near Y. In fact, the opposite direction to the airport. Oh, he said. If I had known that I would have put it into the GPS beforehand. As we were driving along, he tried entering the first two letters of the suburb name. But the wrong suburb came up on the display screen. And he didn’t ... read more

Dear Reader As I'm sure you already know, the original inhabitants of the area we know as Uruguay were hunter gatherers. The most prominent tribe was the Charrúa Indians, who were driven south by the Guaraní Indians from what is now Paraguay. The name Uruguay comes from the Guaraní language and means "river where the painted birds live". As Guapo points out, the South American Indians were not the only ones to name places with descriptive phrases. Maribyrnong, as in the Maribyrnong River (in Melbourne), is said to come from Australian Aboriginal words meaning “I can hear a ringtail possum”. Europeans arrived in the territory of present-day Uruguay in 1516, but as there wasn't a lot of gold and silver, settlement in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries was limited. I read that these ... read more

Dear reader Whenever I mention to friends and work mates that we’re going to Uruguay later in the year I get a quizzical look: where’s that? It’s amazing how few people here in the Canberra region know. Do I speak Spanish? Not a lot, but I’m practising what I know on the Mexican guy in the organic vegetable shop and students from Chile. Guapo is busy reminiscing with his old school friends via Facebook and email. For me there are books and online newspapers to read. In 2005, Uruguay had 1.8 million visitors. With a population of only 3.3 million, that’s a quite a few. Like many other countries in the world (including Australia), Uruguay is working on attracting more tourists. A lot of visitors arrive on cruise ships during the November to April cruise season. ... read more

Dear reader In the 1950s, when Guapo was in primary school in Montevideo,, the classrooms were co-ed, but the playground segregated. He was a pupil at the old British School in Pocitos and remembers the playground divided by a wall, with one area for the girls, the other for the boys. An archway patrolled by teachers connected the two. If a boy misbehaved, he would be sent into the girls’ play area for twenty minutes to stand against the wall – not that any of the boys minded he says! These days though boys and girls share the same playground. When it was time for secondary school, Guapo was sent to a British-style boys’ boarding school in Buenos Aires. Travel to school from Montevideo and home to Pocitos for the holidays was usually by sea plane, ... read more

Dear reader Guapo tells me that in 1950s Argentina, parents of non Spanish speaking background could only give their children names that were translatable into Spanish. So, it was OK to name a baby George because it translated into Jorge. But it wasn’t OK for a bub to be named Keith, because this didn’t have a Spanish equivalent. Now, if you were born across the river there were no such restrictions. In Uruguay, a baby boy could be called Keith or Bruce. Translatability was not an issue. But how do you pronounce Keith and Bruce in Spanish? Keet and Broos. The most common surnames in Uruguay are Rodriguez, Garcia, Gonzalez, Fernandez, Martinez. So how would a Spanish-speaking Uruguayan pronounce Smith, Jones, or Sedgfield? Smit, Jones and Seffil. Nicknames are common in Uruguay. They’re often descriptive and ... read more