The keys to my studio apartment are old fashioned.
One key opens the front door to the building. One key opens a security gate after you enter the front door. One key opens the front door of my unit 104 at 271 Piedras Street. The last key opens a door I don’t know about and don’t want to know about.
The key issue is that four keys look the same, four fit into my apartment front door lock, but only one opens the door.
Looking for something to mark the key that works for my apartment door lock, a tie for a bread bag looks it will work. It is white, easy to bend, sturdy enough to hold up to use. With a few twists, the key I need,for entry to my front door, is now recognizable and I don’t need to stand at my door bumbling like a burglar.
These days, keys are becoming obsolete.
Now doors are opened with cell phones, plastic cards, lifting your palm to a screen, having your face screened by a camera. Some doors require passwords punched out on a keypad. Some doors take several people with different codes to open.
One thing is certain.
Thieves will always be able to get in your home if they want too bad enough.
Making entry harder only saves you from the lazy ones.
The Port reminds me of a toy box in a giant’s kid’s room.
It is walled off from the public with a tall iron fence and each of its entrances is protected by security guards who don’t want people entering without proper credentials. Along the fence’s length you watch big forklifts, big trucks, big containers, big projects, big ships. I am looking for a ferry that can take me to Buenos Aires in a week, doing investigative work before things actually happen. When you don’t speak even grammar school Spanish you need all the time you can to get your passport in order, get your times and tickets, get where you are supposed to be figured out.
The Port is full of shipping containers that are lifted out of massive ships, one at a time, with huge cranes and huge magnets. A crane operator swings his crane into position, lowers a magnet, lifts a container out of its ships hold and gently swings it back over tarmac into a receiving area where men with pencils and notepads keep count.
Separate from the Port ( where you can’t go without authorization), is a ferry called the Burquebus. This is where cars and people catch a boat ride going twice a day to Argentina.
When I get to the front desk at Burguebus I ask about the trip and a lady points to one of her co-workers and says “Ingles.” That means he is the one that takes care of Americans and other non-Spanish speakers.
“Do you have your Argentina Visa?” the bearded young man with wire rim glasses asks?
It turns out, that to enter Argentina, Americans have to buy a 10 year special Argentinian VISA for $200.00 U.S. You can go on line and complete the application and pay for it, then print it out as proof before you board.
At this moment I know this is more trouble and money than I want to endure. It is going to cost more to visit Argentina for a day than it is for a bus to Punta Del Este and a hotel room for a week.
I call and cancel my bed and breakfast in Buenos Aires.
It is hard to run a business when politics runs off your customers.
Next to the farmacia is a door that leads to an upstairs apartment that leads to a family that leads to a mom and dad that leads to a warm place for kids to grow up. When you look at a street of closed doors, faded or chipped or cobbled together, one never knows what is behind them. It is hard to guess what this schoolboy will see when the door to his home opens and he walks into his family bosom.
Kids don’t ask for a lot but they need a home, kind words and behaviors towards them, security, love, and a sense of belonging. These youngsters are brothers and sisters and they are, this afternoon, busy turning back into kids after school has spent all day trying to civilize them.
This afternoon this little boy knocks, peeps into a little slot where mail is dropped, yells out if anyone can open the door and let him inside?
He is excited and ready to dump his school stuff on his bed, then go out into the streets to play soccer with friends.
School isn’t for little boys anymore, but they still have to go.
When you are looking for produce in the Port area you are not near the grand shopping palaces you visit in the United States.
Groceries in the U.S. display well groomed produce as you walk down waxed shiny floors,choose fruit and vegetables from clean bins with sprinklers that mist to make sure the product always looks fresh.There are plastic bags to wrap your choices and stocked product is carefully unpacked from boxes and inspected with blemished items thrown out. You would never suspect vegetables came out of the dirt, or fruits came off trees from the way they are lovingly presented.
In Montevideo, around the Port, there are small fruit and produce stands on the streets. Tourists and residents buy out of these wooden boxes under tarps that protect from too much sun and rain.
Uruguay is famous for wines and beef production, and has one of the world’s largest underground aquifers, but citrus, fruits, and other vegetables are shipped in from Central America, South America and beyond.
This stand has basics – cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, chili’s, lettuce, potatoes.
There is something comforting about buying bananas, apples, carrots and lettuce out of beaten up, chipped, scarred wooden boxes. The beauty is you only have to walk a block to buy what you need.
I’ve been told that you should, in foreign places, eat only things you can peel so I’m careful about my purchases.
Time, that moves too fast the older you get, slows to a more comfortable clip when you have to walk to do your shopping.
Money might not make the world go round, but it provides lubrication .
Looking for an ATM to get cash to pay for my rented vacation studio in Ciudad Vieja, I have apprehension.
Banks and credit card companies have been told Scott will be out of the country. They have been given names of the countries I will be visiting and have authorized the cards to be used. ATM’s are blood transfusions to the withering traveler. If you don’t have money, you are going to the mat in a place where you have no friends, don’t speak the language, can’t read the street signs.
This machine asks what language I prefer, asks whether I want dollars or Pesos, asks whether funds are coming from savings, checking, or credit card.
I go through each step but the transaction is cancelled. People are in line behind me so I take my card and myself for a walk. Why is this not working?
It hits me like a brick that I wasn’t prompted to enter my card’s password.
This next try I punch in my password before I hit ” continuar ” and follow instructions, to the end.
It is the right solution because the machine spits out hundred dollar bills that are so crisp that Ben Franklin must be printing inside the ATM,as I wait.
ATM’s are a three letter word I like. It is amazing that a machine in a foreign country will give me money even though it doesn’t know me from Adam..
ATM’s are as close to a money tree as us guys are likely to get.
After an eight hour wait at the Miami International Airport, I board a plane this Saturday evening and safely get off the ground for Montevideo, Uruguay.
Scheduled to arrive Sunday around eleven, our plane does, and we leave our transport this morning and form yet another line to go through Customs.
This night flight has been a mix of crying babies, lights going on and off, flight attendants moving up and down the aisles passing out pillows and eye shades. One guesses any group of people can be difficult and flight attendants are needed because there are hundreds of passengers on this red eye flight from Miami.
Customs in Montevideo goes rapidly. All you need is your Passport. They don’t ask for proof of a return flight, only ask how long I will be here and where I am staying. Getting checked bags is a breeze. Having to register my I Phone is a bit odd, but I do it.
Uruguay is now more than a shape on a world map. It is not a country on the tip of everyone’s tongue and is near the bottom of the alphabet, not far from Zimbabwe. Uruguay sounds like something you can catch in Africa, but I didn’t need shots to get in and the country comes well praised.
Without a flag to plant, or anyone to meet, I have arrived.
Weary, I will curl up in the crook of the U in Uruguay and hold the letter tightly till sleep covers me like a warm blanket.
Even the best plans of men go awry and the best planned trips get caught in rough currents.
Boarding my plane in Albuquerque, all things are possible. I am scheduled to fly from Albuquerque to Dallas, Dallas to Miami, Miami to Montevideo, Uruguay.There is no doubt this trip will happen, in proper order, until the Captain of our American Airlines jet announces a ” maintenance problem. ”
We are stuck on an Albuquerque runway,our plane’s engines won’t start, so we taxi back to the gate for grease monkeys to determine what the plane’s problem is,and, if possible, fix it.
Sitting in our plane, an hour and a half assessment is completed. Finally, with supervisor approval, techs jump start engines and we taxi back out and get airborne on our second try.
The traveler seated next to me is from Peru. He makes his living explaining mutual funds to South American financial advisers and tells me Uruguay is nice which gives me some comfort that this trip will be better than it has begun.
In the Miami airport, a huge floral design on a wall above an escalator going down to Customs, reminds me that Peace and Love are the hardest words to live by in the English language.
It is two in the morning before a shuttle from the Hotel Element picks up six of us stranded travelers and gets us safe to our airline paid compensatory rooms for having missed our ongoing connections through airline error.
It isn’t an auspicious beginning for this trip, but at least I reach Florida with all my body parts.
Statistically, airline travel is safe, but fear of falling really kills us.
At the Albuquerque International Sun Port I ride two escalators, get my boarding pass, check my baggage, then get processed by airport security.
Channeled down a long winding roped off aisle with cutbacks, my airline ticket is initialed with a black ball point pen and my passport and driver’s license are checked for authenticity. A bespeckled TSA agent wearing latex gloves, and a dour expression, waves me towards the x-ray machines behind us,and still in line with other travelers, I load my cowboy boots into a plastic container along with my belt, wallet, keys, loose change, smart phone and laptop. My carry on bag is already moving down a conveyor belt ahead of me, stopped for a second while the belt operator looks at a strange shape in someone else’s luggage.
Next to get processed, like meat in a slaughterhouse, I am x-rayed, patted down, confirmed, and finally cleared to go to my assigned gate and board a plane.
Travelers in wheelchairs and diapers go through the same procedures I do, all of us stamped and approved by bland looking blue uniformed men and women doing their government work without a smile.
As our country turns totalitarian, keeping my eyes on all Exits is prudent.
To catch one terrorist we have all become guilty.
Proving yourself innocent costs more for a lawyer than i can afford.
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