Oscar el Grouch

Believe it or not, there are a few interesting things about Uruguay that don’t involve how sad my apartment is.

I mentioned the “trash-mules” without explaining them. Here is something you may know but may not think about: Americans produce an astronomical amount of trash. Most people I know have very large trashcans in their kitchen and in their garages (if they have them), and then smaller, bucket sized trashcans in almost every other room of the house. If there’s not one in in the living- and bedrooms then at very least they have a trashcan in the bathroom. Everything collected in these into large bins, which go to the curb, or down chutes into dumpsters or wherever. If sanitation workers went on strike like Sara Cynthia Silvia Stout in that Shel Silverstein poem, we’d all be swimming in filth.

Well. I don’t think I’ve ever travelled to a country with enough trashcans for my huge American consumption-level. In Panama we had to buy trashcans, in France I horded plastic bags so I had somewhere to throw things away, in India people just throw things on the ground so I suppose that’s just one enormous trashcan, but I will never get past the voice in my head that screams, “OH MY GOD, SAVE THE LITTLE ANIMALS!! PICK THAT UP!” I came home with trash in my pockets.

(Apparently--I consume everything on a ridiculous American Supersize Me level. Our apartment came with "one month" of  internet. I used it up in three days.)

Here in Uruguay our “furnished” apartment has two trashcans: one in the kitchen the size of a very small bucket, and one in the bathroom the size of a measuring cup. As you can see from our giant trash pile, this arrangement is inadequate.

I think this must mean that people take their trash out every morning and are not ok with living surrounded by buckets of their own filth like Americans are. But I also know this isn’t true because, like the French, Uruguayans allow their dogs to shit everywhere, and leave it there. I think, maybe, somehow, they truly just produce less trash.

Montevideo is a city filled with enormous apartment buildings. That seems to be almost all it is. Every couple of blocks sits a small green dumpster. The contents of these dumpsters are collected by wooden carts with large canvas sacks on the back, which drawn by mules. I do not understand how all of the trash from four 12-story buildings can fit in one dumpster, and then be carted away by one sleepy, bored-looking mule.

I’m not all that surprised by the presence of the mules—the streets are narrow and the traffic is only loosely governed by any discernible laws (people seem to instinctually know who has the right of way where and when—there are very few street signs and lights) so the mule carts are more compact and easy to navigate than a big truck. Mules or no mules, it was not my personal agenda to produce more garbage than the entire population of the city, but somehow it looks like we’re on track to set the record. America: go big or go home.