Traditions

Today I walked by a little boy sitting on a wall wearing a red, plastic firefighter's helmet.  He must have been about 8 or 9, and he was in a trance.  We're talking serious concentration here. And, what was he doing?  Why, digging for gold!!  Which brings me to my blog today:

I have been observing this all around me for months, and I have come to the conclusion that picking your nose in public is perfectly acceptable in Uruguay.  People do it on the bus.  They do it in their cars at stoplights.  They do it on the sidewalk, and they even do it while they're talking to you (maybe with just a little more subtlety).  And NO ONE seems to be bothered or disgusted by this.  It goes completely unnoticed!  Maybe this terrible habit developed out of necessity.  There's a lot of pollution, so maybe people get boogified more intensely in this country.  Whatever the case, I would like to make a post to all the nose-pickers in Uruguay: May your mocos (boogies) be bountiful and your fingers flexible so that you may never have nothing to do with those manos (hands) when you are not drinking mate!

In keeping with the theme of traditions, I would like to mention a little tradition of my own.  But first I need to start by saying a typical despedida (farewell) in Uruguay is, "Chau! Besos!"  This chau is not ciao.  I have been criticized for this.  Besos means kisses.  You can say besos (kisses), besitos (little kisses) or even BESOTE (big ole kiss!).  Orrrr, you can do what I've been doing when I speak quickly and accidently jumble it all together and just say BOW!  This has become embarrassingly common in my daily speech, and for some reason I cannot stop it!  It just comes out like word vomit, all pourin' out uncontrollably n stuff.  I've been making a conscious effort to separate the two words but instead of getting better, it seems to be getting worse!  It seems to happen the most when I'm talking with Flavia, my Brazilian friend who just moved in with me for a few weeks.  I'm about to go out to dinner with her right now, so I gotta go!  

Oh, but before I do, I found out that the thing about the blank votes.  If you cast a blank vote, it is counted as a vote for the majority.  I guess whoever told me that was assuming the Frente Amplio was going to win the majority and just told me all blank votes go to Pepe this year.  So that's that.

BOW!