Differences: Breakfasts. Making Chili.

A roommate recently asked me if it were true that in the USA people sometimes eat really big breakfasts. She said she had seen it in the movies that we did. I told her that we didn’t always eat big breakfasts, but certainly when we had time (weekends, holidays, family get-togethers) we would eat a [...]

Hit and La Vela Puerca

I went to see my first movie here called Hit. It was a documentary featuring Uruguayan musicians who have been important historically, especially during the years of dictatorship. After the movie, over Budweiser and white bread sandwiches, Andrea told us terrible tales of when she was young and there was military rule in Uruguay. ‘Hit’ [...]

A professor. Of fashion?! 21 April 2008

This week I was invited to be the guest lecturer for a class at the University of Montevideo. The class, “Seminaro de comunicación y moda,” looks at the relationship between fashion, communication, and culture. My task was to talk about fashion and culture, which I took to mean fashion as a tool to impact culture, [...]

Mate (the beverage. A way of life.)

Never caught without a mate and thermos, Uruguayans are famous for their consumption of this highly caffeinated tea. Mate is ironically not cultivated within Uruguay, rather it is imported from Brazil and Paraguay. I have been told that in Buenos Aires when someone carries mate on the street they are said to be acting “as [...]

“Rio is a city of paradox, a city of contradictions.” (A visual).

“Top of Latin America´s inequality league table comes Brazil, one of the most unequal nations on earth, where the richest 10% of the population earns 49 times the income of the poorest 10%…Brazil has been scathingly rechristened “Belindia”–a hybrid where the middle class enjoy the European lifestyle of a Belgium, surrounded by the impoverished masses [...]

“Rio is a city of paradox, a city of contradictions.”

“Today Mike and I drove our bikes through side streets and alleyways to Sugar Loaf Mountain. From its heights we could see topography confessing to the inequality that inhabited it. Favelas built in the gaps shouting from the hillside ‘We are here. We are here.’”
Wikipedia defines a favela as the Brazilian equivalent of a shanty [...]