My nephew arrived for a week’s visit yesterday morning and brought with him my annual resupply of gigantic clothing from my favorite King Size Men’s Store; Omar the Tent Maker. His motto is “if it was big enough for Goliath, it ought to fit you too”. The only problems I have with them is that sometimes the tent canvas is a little rough for underwear or the stripes from the reused circus tents don’t get completely bleached out…All kidding aside, I was happy to get this year’s shipment because everything was two sizes smaller than last year, so I am making progress. I have thus far lost the equivalent in kilograms or about half an average Uruguayo–that means I have about 1 1/2 to go.
I am told that there are one or two “Ropas Grandes” (Big Clothes) stores in Montevideo, but since “big” is a relative term, I haven’t held out much hope of finding anthing useful there:Â at 6′4″ (1.93m) and more kilograms than I care to admit, I think I need to be looking for a store that sells Ropas Enormes.
My nephew also brought the second of three parts of my annual vitamin supply (trying to get vitamins shipped to Uruguay is one of the nightmares of living here–you need permits from 3 different ministries). Don’t get me wrong. They do sell vitamins and supplements here, but, on average, I need to take six of the local pills for every one of the pills I can import from Yankee occupied America. This means that instead of the 18 tablets and capsules I take daily, I would need to take about 108 if purchased locally. That evens strains my Uruguayan nationalism!
That being said, I must admit that I try to buy as many things here as I can: the major exceptions being gigantic clothes, vitamins and handicapped specialty items.
They do have wheelchairs here–but the wheels they use are horrible. 
They are bicycle wheels. So unless you are a feather-weight, they don’t hold up very long. A few places use plastic wheelchair wheels, but they seem to be made out of Red Chinese junk that last for 30 days or at least 1 hour after the warranty has expired–besides, who the heck can read the “Limited Warranty” when it is written in Mandarin characters?
We came up with a couple solutions to the bad wheels–the best has been putting 6 or 8 iron big spokes within the bicycle wheels. This provides the strength necessary, but makes the chairs so heavy only Borko or a fork lift can carry them.
For virtually everything else I have found a good local substitute or work-around.
One of my favorite local solutions has to do with furniture. You can have furniture “built to fit” in some of the smaller stores in the northern part of Montevideo more cheaply here than you can buy new furtnitureat some place like Divino. So I had extra wide wing-back chairs and a love seat built. Then, to add height to them (and also make them more handicapped friendly) I have metal frames with wheels built on the bottom of them–thus they are wide enough for my rather large bottom (or two or three average Uruguayos) and high enough so I am not chewing on my knees when I sit down.
One other work around I am trying does require the importation of a key element: a US style sprinkler hose. I bought one from Amazon.com and it is being shipped in via Miami Box. (Since it is under US$50, it will come through customs without a problem.) I had to buy it in the States because I couldn’t find anyone here who had any idea what i was talking about (and the idea of poking pin holes in a regular hose just didn’t seem feasible).
If you haven’t figure out where I am going with this, you are not from the South in the “Old Days”. We used to call this “Florida Air Conditioning”–it works especially well on tile roofs, like I have now.
It really is very simple. You put the sprinkler hose on the roof and turn it on during the heat of the day. The evaporating water takes the heat out of the tiles and cools the rooms below them by several degrees. So, unless the laws of physics are different south of the equator (which is a distinct possibility), it should work. I will let you know.
Boy am I glad I used to build “Rube Goldberg” machines–that talent has saved me more often than I care to remember in the last 10 years.
