The Ks get creamed, and so does the FA

My usual and determined stance of maintaining a absolute ignorance about political comings and goings in the region has been hard to sustain these past couple of days, when, to my horror, I have succumbed to excitement about the elections Sunday on both sides of the river.

Being more manageable and stable, the Uruguayan primary elections were not as momentous, no "life or death" feeling about them. Actually I had come to terms with what many feared would be the certain result of the November presidential elections, a victory by the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio, headed by former guerrilla Mujica. As repulsive as that feels to me (and to practically two thirds of the country, I would venture), in the end I don't feel Uruguay would descend into Chavez-Morales-Kirchner dementia, so frankly I was not so fired up by the primaries.

But the beating taken by the FA on Sunday and the surprisingly high turnout of voters for the Partido Nacional (the best, viable alternative for these elections, despite many shortcomings) were really inspiring. Suddenly my call months ago that the presidential election would be Lacalle vs Mujica, with Lacalle winning, does not seem so farfetched any longer.

And lastly, the poor, beaten Partido Colorado has found a viable leader for future elections at least. True, he's a son of Bordaberry, and that is hard to swallow for many, including yours truly. Plus, that whole Opus Dei thing is gag-inducing as well, but I'm sure that he will find a way to neutralize his religious fervor in order to win the vote of a secular country like Uruguay.

But the true joy this week has come from Argentina. The uber-enemies of Uruguay, Cristina and Nestor Kirchner, took a well deserved beating that has had us watching Argentine political talk shows on TV for days now. The reign has been broken, they lost their majorities in both chambers of Congress, new "presidentiables" have emerged both in the opposition as well as within their own party, and Nestor had to quit as party chairman. The humiliation could not have been greater, especially since they framed the mid-term congressional elections as a referendum on their performance.

Onwards and upwards

Ficus repens -- creeping soon up a wall near us.

Maybe I´ve been sidetracked with the landscaping for a while, but it´s high time we do finish this house!

With that in mind, today I called Hugo, a local realtor-cum-general contractor who I´m hoping will give me a reasonable estimate for making a large deck next to the pool. We have a lot of slate tiles left over from the patio downstairs, and rather than doing a wooden deck, I want to continue with the same slate, even if I need to buy a whole bunch more. I´m aiming for 1.3 times the size of the pool, more or less, or about 600 square feet of slate surface.

This mini-project, in addition to giving the place a more finished, neater look, will free up sprinklers to concentrate on the heavily planted borders of the lot. The sprinkler thing is a growing issue, the more land, the more I plant, the more sprinklers I need, and we´ve arrived at a point where for the next extension we need a new irrigation computer and maybe a new well, or we are risking overusing the pump (if it has to be pumping 12 hours a night) or we have to figure out something else.

That something else may be a combination of less lawn (helped by the coming deck) and possibly a rainwater collection system, seeing that we have lots of roof surface. Rainwater would also allow us to use a drip irrigation system (now we are prevented from doing so by the heavy composition of our well water, which would clog the drip holes). So I have an appointment with Antonio, a neighbor from Punta Negra who as chance would have it stopped by to offer solar and irrigation systems last week.

The next round of improvements will involve enclosing the downstairs bbq area, which will give us a further 645 square feet of usable indoor space. That one is pricey because it´s all windows, sliding doors, etc., and possibly some cabinetry. We desperately need some storage space for garden stuff, tools, dog stuff, a proper "mud room", etc., and it would be nice to be able to use the bbq downstairs year round, regardless of wind conditions and without a pack of dogs walking all over us.

Lastly, we are planning big changes to the outside appearance of the house, involving dark charcoal paint for the wood cladding, and covering the brick/mortar cube side with a green creeper. This will contrast with all the white windowframes and the white retaining wall downstairs.

We have chosen the ficus repens, and already planted them all around the three sides, and were told that once they start growing they go up very fast. It´s a perennial, with a tiny, flat leaf. For now, they look like little crappy mounds next to the wall. But I can picture the super chic dark grey and dark green, framed by sea and sky blues and the surrounding, lighter green landscape, and I get very excited. The paint job will have to wait for spring cash-flows, but we will probably have the pool deck started soon.


One King´s Lane´s homepage image is sort of the color scheme, although we are planning a darker grey. We even have the matching dog!

Also, lest I forget, we need to fence in the new lot. I am coming to the conclusion that we will divide our land into two lots, with the one the house is on and the one the pool is sited on becoming one lot, and the other two next to the road joined as another lot, more or less half an acre each. I will run a fence dividing them, leaving a gate between them for now, and will install a gate on the far side of the road. This way, if I decide to sell either the house or the other lot they will already be landscaped separately.

Acacia bayleyana rubra

And talking of the devil, with Barbi in Turkey doing the BarbiTour2009, I couldn´t help but run to the nursery the second he left. We have identified a new species that is supposed to do well in our place, and that I find very beautiful: the acacia bayleyana rubra, a shrub-tree with greyish purplish foliage and huge yellow flowers. The rubra refers to the purple color of the new leaves. It´s hardy, we see it all over tough spots of Punta del Este, so we will give it a try.


To anyone who knows the coast of Maldonado, Uruguay, and knows anything about plants, it´s shocking to hear that my pitosporums have "underperformed," to put it nicely. So we´re addressing this with reverse psychology, adding some more pitosporum, to see if the ones we have are so lackluster because we did not plant enough of them to provide them with mutual support from the winds. That´s the theory now.

Pitosporum

Lastly, we have a drainage problem that we will address with plants. We have several drainage problems, but one area of water pooling is particularly ideal for an island of cattails, and knowing that a block away towards the sea there´s a whole corner covered in them, I´m 100% sure they will prosper. One less place for the dogs to wallow in mud.


And what about our landgrab? I made a half-hearted effort today to acquire one more adjacent quarter acre lot. I called the mean old lady, who at this point has warmed up so much she almost sounds happy to hear from me (this being my 10th call in a year and a half), and made an offer she flat out refused. It sounded like I hit on the right price, but she was not into giving me 18 months to finish paying the full amount. What in Uruguay is called "facilidades" or short-term vendor financing, which is the way most property is sold.

Then I called Hugo and told him this, and asked him to pass on the same offer to the guy who owns another lot back to back with our newest one. It´s not nearly as good for us, but if I get my terms, we´ll get it, and have frontage on three streets. Frankly, if I don´t commit to forced savings like this, the money just vanishes into thin air. So if it´s a no from my adjacent neighbors, I will look for someting else, something where the seller doesn´t know how much I want the property, preferrably :-)

One place my money is vanishing into is 20x200.com, the addictive "cool art for the masses" website I got tipped about by my friend Victoria. The premise is every week there is one, or several, launches of limited edition prints by up-and-coming artists, with the smaller 8x10 sizes going for $20. It's so of the moment that in a matter of two weeks one artist whose prints I bought did a New Yorker cover, and another whose print I've been staring at for weeks (Alex MacLean) was used as an illustration in the New York Times. But the bottom line is that the curator chooses lots of things I really like.

So this week I stepped up and ordered my first $50 print, after several $20 ones. I better buy some land soon or I can see this taking a dangerous turn.

Yes, more planting

Tibouchina

I guess people who build their homes must become obsessed with different things once the main project is over. In my case it's clear to see it's the landscaping and anything to do with the yard.

We still require further "infrastructure" work. The sprinkler system has been expanded to its full potential (two expansions) and is about to get a new computer because we're out of "sectors" to assign. Not to mention the perimeter fence that needs to be moved out to enclose the lot we bought last year. Hope Barbi doesn't read this until he's gone to Turkey.

The ground has received multiple truckloads of top soil to make it more fertile and more even, easier to mow, eventually. But we're not done with that either, we need about 3 or 4 more truckloads, on top of the 7 we have used up since July last year.

And the planting continues apace. Some sections of the perimeter are dense enough already that I start thinking about "editing", taking something from here to move over there. Most sections still need a second or third layer of shrubs in order to fill them in or make them more interesting looking. But in certain areas we're still struggling to fill out the perimeter, if only with one layer of shrub/tree.

Against this backdrop, we just took delivery of a couple hundred new shrubs and trees, which were planted over the last week. New arrivals include the retama (a yellow flowered broom, which is endemic around our place) which will be lined up against certain segments of the border with some neighbors and on the sidewalk on the main road, hoping it will create a good barrier for winds blowing from the ocean side. Agustin from Proverde, our lovely neighborhood nursery, says the retama is very slow growing, but I'm stubborn and am willing to give it a try. I show him the huge mounds near the house, and he says "Those are 50 years old". We'll see, we planted a total of 30 or 40.

Retamas near our house a couple of springs ago

Another one making a debut is the melaleuca, which has a bottle-brush like white flower, and beautiful foliage, thin and tapered with a red tinge in new growth, plus the reputation for withstanding any rough weather we throw at it.

We went full on with the photinia, which did very well since we planted the 5 bushes on a trial basis a couple of months ago, so now we added 15 new bushes, these ones actually huge, tree sized almost, around 7 feet tall.

We also added 5 more dodonea bushes, which have fared excellently, only because they were too cramped against the fence and wanted to make them more visible and irregularly laid out.

We doubled the number of native guava trees to 10, a little grove, on the "new lot" near the road, and added a double layer of retama on the "sidewalk" of that lot, in front of the poplar trees. Perpendicular to the road, still in the "new lot", we planted a line of acacia trinervis trees about 35 feet long, intended to work as a hedge to protect the road-front corner of our yard from the ocean wind. We planted them very close together and we will prune them so they remain shortish, dense and bushy, protecting the guava, olive, araza and a couple other fruit trees already planted there, and also further block the view of the yard from the road.

Next to the vegetable patch we added five more tamarix (we had only 3 there) and another 10 against the fence following the agapanthus patch, and on the other side of the fence (read our neighbor's yard) we planted quite a few retamas. The plan is to continue planting more tamarix and agapanthus on a boomerang shape once we incorporate the new lot into the yard, following the angle of the lots' perimeter. That will require a couple hundred agapanthus and a few dozen tamarix, but that's for the next batch, probably in July after Omar the fencer has moved the fence.

But the most exciting recently has been the planting, in two stages, of 40 tibouchina bushes, with a backdrop of formios to both frame them and act as windbreakers, against the western fence, behind the pool and the palm trees. I don't feel like taking pictures right now when everything looks so bleak, especially after I pruned everything in the yard, but I will show them in their full glory if they make it to the summer. As the picture on top shows, they have a fat rabbit's ear like furry leaf, and lots of little purple flowers. And massed like that, unevenly planted over a length of about 45 feet, they look absolutely super cute. I will be praying that they survive the rough winter.

The vegetable patch has been sorely neglected for months and months. Yet, we found some time to till a considerable part and plant it with broccoli. We didn't even bother making seedlings firts, we just pushed the seed in, and there are tons of little broccoli sprouting now. Another "wait and see if they survive" thing. The leeks are fantastic, we've been eating them and there's lots left. The carrots have been harvested, and we always have ciboulette, garlic-ette and scallions to cut off, plus the year-round watercress, the celery and assorted herbs. The cherry tomatoes keep on producing fruit, but it doesn't taste good anymore...

Next I will plant spinach and a Brazilian collard green (couve) whose seeds were brought to me from Brazil and which probably won't survive the weather, but I will give it a try.

The lion's tail

I keep running into people who seem to gloat about what they perceive as the impending collapse of Punta del Este. They even feel the need to discredit or question the validity of an independent report that shows that real estate prices have actually increased during the worst of the global crisis, and they insist on forecasting an imminent crash.

This line of thought has been cropping up for about 3 years already, and of course, nothing I can say can deter what at times sounds like plain ill-wishing. There are some who genuinely believe that an x% price increase means a bubble (although few of us can ever pinpoint the bursting of a bubble with any accuracy).

There are others who simply want to transpose their experiences in other markets to this one. What I learned in financial reporting was that you can't expect identical behaviors in different markets. It's just not that easy. Brazil is not Mexico, the U.S. is not Uruguay, that much I've learned.

But among the Punta bears there are many who simply appear resentful, intimidated by the proximity of wealthy people. This has got me thinking about the eternal lion's tail/mouse's head dilemma.

I was recently told of a social experiment whose results go something like this: pay a guy 300k and put him in a place where everyone makes $600k, and he will be miserable. Pay the same guy $100k and put him among neighbors making $30k, and he will be in heaven. So I guess it's human nature.

But I prefer to be the one living among people who make a lot more than me. It's very easy to save money by not eating out so often in the pricier location, or by buying produce at the farmer's market on a regular basis, rather than at the more expensive supermarket. And let's face it, there's always budget options for everything.

But at least in Uruguay - and to a certain extent this applies to most countries - in places where everyone makes barely enough to scrape by (I'm thinking of places like the Costa de Oro, Piriapolis, Atlantida, etc. where many expats are settling down these days) it's impossible to find a top quality restaurant meal, a multiplex movie-theater, or a variety of sports facilities or generally well maintained and clean public spaces, be them parks or beaches, not to mention roads that do not look like the result of a meteorite shower.

And when you have a similar facility, it's really not the same in the poorer place. A case in point is the Tienda Inglesa supermarket. Atlantida is their only money-losing store, and it shows. Conversely, Punta del Este's is the highest grossing store, and they work hard to keep it that way. In Piriapolis we are "blessed" with the Devoto, which saves on lighting so you don't really see what it is you're buying.

After a year and a half of exploring and ruling out every dining possibility in Piriapolis - which is half the distance from our place than Punta del Este actually is -- we're down to two establishments, one of which is an excellent pizza joint, and another whose meals are uniformly very good, although unimaginative and unoriginal, set in a drab space, and whose catalogue of side dishes features only POTATOES and mixed salad. The prices are the same as our favorite place in Punta del Este, which, to make it short, is in a completely different league.

Last but not least, many wealthy people are interesting! Financial success in itself is, often, a result of other traits that can make a person very engaging, so I don't personally feel the need to run away in the opposite direction. Further, Punta del Este offers the chance of attending social gatherings where topics go beyond Uruguayan soccer and politics because everyone is from wherever and those two subjects therefore fail to gain much purchase. That alone is worth living in (well, near) Punta del Este for me, but that's maybe because I'm Uruguayan :-)