Today I woke extra early to drive into Montevideo for a few reasons. The first reason is that ExFedBob and I and DiverBob and WifeBob too are all seeking Paraguayan residency because hey, it’s easy, and you can never have too many. Collect them all! Since Uncle Sam is giving Paraguay the shaft as far as requiring Paraguayos to get an entry visa before visiting, Paraguay is rightly reciprocating and giving us the shaft in return. So we need tourist entry visas and need to visit the embassy in Montevideo.
The second reason is that I am selling my old apartment in Montevideo so I can use the money for something fun and worthwhile, instead of watching it slowly compost in the humidity that leaks down from the perpetually retarded neighbors upstairs. Let it be someone else’s problem. The realtors appraised it and fortunately we will make a decent buck on the sale.
The day began with the drive. I picked up ExFedBob and we drove the 2.5 hours to Montevideo. WifeBob stayed home; she would prefer to park a dirt tiller deep in her anus over standing in line as a marionette for worthless government deskjockeys. I would too, but alas one of us has to take it for the team.
As part of the requirement is to have some passport photographs with your application, ExFedBob and I started the search for a place which takes the photos. We walked all over Ciudad Vieja, even across the street from Migraciones, and nobody knew where to have them done. We literally stopped in a dozen places and nobody knew. Well, that’s not entirely correct. They told us “yeah, there’s a place at so-and-so, they do them,” and we’d go there, and there would be nothing. We walked around the city for an hour looking in vain. Then we had to return to the apartment to meet with the realtor and let him have a look around. Meanwhile, ExFedBob used his mad research skills to locate a place which actually took the photos.
During this time, I got a call from the dirt guy who was already at my house ready to dump the dirt in the yard. This has a story to it as well…
A few weeks ago WifeBob and I thought it would be a fun idea to build raised garden beds in the unused portion of our gravel driveway which for some reason ended up spanning across half the damn yard. It was wasted space and now we are using it. So we built 23 square meters of garden space there, enough for an awesome garden. We graded and leveled and everything, put in the plastic liners, stained and protected the wood, etc. They are truly beautiful things. Then we began the Quest for Dirt.
The vivero near us sells dirt by the bag for an absurd price of $10 each, for maybe a 30-liter bag. Ridiculous. So I asked them if they know someone who does dirt by the truckload. They gave me his number and I called him. He wanted $600 for the dirt! No way, says I, is it made of gold or what?
So the search for other dirt sources commenced. I have a free source of unlimited horse shit from a friend’s farm but that does me no good. Eventually this same friend gave me a lead on another dirt guy, and he had a very reasonable price, for 10 cubic meters (2 truckloads) of sifted (stone-free) topsoil, for $300 total. Sign me up, says I. OK, says he, but it’s been raining so I have to wait for the pile to dry up. I’ll call you when it’s ready.
Uruguayos NEVER call you back; it’s a cultural thing. So I called him a couple times over the past week or two to see how things were going. Not yet, he said, give it a couple more days.
So I was absolutely floored when he called me while I was in Montevideo and said he was a few blocks from my house. I gave him directions on where to find the house, and told him that the wife was home, and to go knock on the door. Here, call her number, says I.
WifeBob is nowhere to be found. DirtBob calls me back and says he knocked on the door and there was no answer, and also WifeBob is not answering her phone. OK, maybe she has gone on a walk to the store, she ought to be back in 15 minutes. I’ll call you back if you don’t find her first, give it a few and let’s see what happens.
No WifeBob. Still no answer on the phone. I am doing all this while we are searching for photo places and showing the realtor around the apartment, by the way.
More phone calls back and forth, can’t get WifeBob on the phone. Finally I reach her and she goes out to look for DirtBob (and she’s mad at ME because DirtBob just showed up without announcement or planning, like all Uruguayos do, as if this is something new! Be glad you are actually getting dirt, woman, because with the effort it took to find and arrange, I could have learned the long lost dark arts of alchemy, willed the goddamn stuff into existence, and built an army of golem slaves to move it where it needs to go!!!)
Turns out she was sleeping and didn’t hear the phone ringing. Anyhow, DirtBob is a couple houses down, and no wonder he hadn’t gotten WifeBob’s attention because he was knocking on the wrong door. Who knows how that happened because I told him it was the house without a name in front, between (x) house and (y) house. Not rocket science. Maybe that’s why he is DirtBob and not BrainSurgeonBob. WifeBob, ever prepared, does not have the money to pay DirtBob and strategically asks him to bring the second truckload tomorrow. So the Quest for Dirt is completed, sort of.
OK, one situation defused. Kinda.
By the time we finished with the realtor and went to get the photos, it was 12:00 noon. Great, we think, because the embassy’s posted hours are 9:30am until 3pm, and we still have 3 hours to get this done. Erring on the side of caution, we ordered 8 photos each, because we know that somehow the bureaucrats will lose everything 4 times so best to have enough copies on hand.
Good, another situation defused. Or so we thought…
We drive to the consulate, find a parking space, and walk around to the gate. We tell the guard we are there for tourist visas. No, not here, says he, go to that building down yonder, that’s where the tourist voodoo happens. So we go there. Another gate, another guard. We stand there at the gate waving our hands for about a minute in front of the guard booth, which is maybe 20 feet away, and we can see the guard looking off into space and not noticing us. Finally we get his attention, and state our intentions. No, this place is only open from 9 until 12. Look at the clock, 1:30.
Skullfuck me with a sledgehammer.
Do that twice. Because for the past couple of weeks, 3 of us have been attempting to contact the Paraguayan consulate in Montevideo by phone to find out the proper hours and procedure for this whole thing. They never pick up their phone and never return calls. I firmly believe that they have someone there who is paid to sit and watch a phone ring all day.
We called SwingDanceBob to see if she wanted to hang out and cry into some beer with us, but she was unavailable, so we called VikingBob, who was. And we cried into our beers with our tails between our legs. Then we drove another 2.5 hours home, and must return on Monday to attempt a repeat of the whole goddamn process.
All for a rubber stamp on a piece of paper.
Ain’t this all just a fucking bag of laughs?