Shake your booty classes

This is the teacher, yes, Natasha Lunar

OK, the politically correct designation is "Arab dance" or danza arabe, at least here. Good ol' bellydancing... From what I can tell they are only for women, but maybe we can talk my husband into setting up a course for the guys. He's been known to upstage Princess Amina at Baby Gouda...

But for the time being, men can go drop off and pick up their significant others or daughters at the Tao gym (on one of those curvy roads somewhere behind Punta Shopping/Roosevelt/Avenida Italia.

Classes for adults meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, and for teenagers (if you really want your teenagers "studying" bellydancing) are held on Tuesdays, from 5:20 to 6:20. Adult classes cost UYU1,000 per month, and classes for teenagers cost UYU600/month.

If you're not into taking courses but would like to hire Natasha for parties, she's also available.

Call 099 072 097 or email natashalunar at hotmail dot com

Maldondao honey, from the farm to your table

Is that where honey is grown? In a farm? I´m kidding, but to this day I remember asking for Fanta trees and french fries trees as a small, city-bred child. Anyway, Uruguay affords us the chance to indulge in the oh so popular trend of buying local, and of consuming organic food and produce, and as we're discovering, often there´s free home delivery thrown in as well.

To make it more apropos to our expat/English Speaking theme, a local Uruguayan family with with a British heritage -- Francisco and James Bloomfield -- and a house in Solis, is producing this honey in the Cerros Azules area of western Maldonado.

A kilogram jar costs just 130 pesos, and will be delivered free to your door (that is, if you live between Solis and Punta del Este. For other locations write to James and ask.) The Bloomfields are also offering bee pollen, at 110 pesos per 200 gram jar.

This honey is produced by bees feeding on native forest and eucalyptus, as told to me by James Bloomfield, who stressed the absence of any additives of any kind. Pure pure honey. For those with farms, they also install beehives to aid with pollinization.


For orders or enquiries, write to James themontevidean at adinet dot com dot uy or call him at 099 252572

099 252572

Cooking classes

We're on the mailing list for View Point restaurant and café, and so we receive all their promotional announcements. This one I find interesting: they are offering cooking classes, starting on September 2. Call 042-44-80-15 to reserve your spot.

Their food is "gourmet" and although I´ve only been at the café (fantastic sandwiches, to-die-for pastries, etc., and pricey) and I have tasted their catering (top notch, with excellent presentation, service and as I remember, an incredible risotto and outstanding desserts) I would venture that whatever one learns in their course would be good for showing off when hosting a dinner party at home.

For those out there interested in the subject, there are lots of cooking courses to be had at the Universitario Gastronomico de Punta del Este, located across from the back parking lot of the Punta Shopping mall. The UG is structured like a formal degree issuing university institution, hence its name, but it also offers short courses or "seminars" on everything from olive oil selection to Jewish cuisine 101. Check out their website for the course offering, www.ug.edu.uy, email info@ug.edu.uy, or call 042-48-07-45.

Summer in August, we have that too!

Expecting to see a weather forecast that would include a massive storm for this evening or tomorrow, I logged on to find an entire week of balmy weather ahead of us. 

If we are to believe the weather people, today is actually the coolest day, with temperatures rising progressively to the high 20s (upper 70sF) until they drop on Monday.

Great way to celebrate Indpendence Day today, for those who are not working. 

Where do you live? In the Uruguayan Riviera...

I always thought it was very cheesy when people talked about the Turkish Riviera, back when I was a Turkish Rivieran, and now, watching my place of residence become the Uruguayan Riviera, I can´t help but snort with laughter.

The Daily Mail provides the latest in free destination publicity, of the "this is an article about Punta del Este, but forget Punta del Este which I didn´t really visit, and go to Jose Ignacio, stop at La Huella, then go to Garzón, meet Mallmann, and don´t forget to have dinner at Marismo, that´s what us people in the know do".

Love it when, on second reference, Jose Ignacio becomes "Jose." It´s possibly the revenge against the Spanish language for dwellers of the River Plate calling a personal trainer "el pérsonal."

Frankly, when my friend Viia wrote the template for this article for Forbes about 3 years ago, well, she "designed the tour" for all them googlers with a press pass out there, so to speak, and did it well, and besides having written the first and best of such articles, she also did write about Punta del Este! OK, disclaimer, she did quote us in the article, but so did other reporters, none of whom compare to fabulous Viia.

Maybe my not-so-elated reaction derives from the fact that "Punta del Este, former St. Tropez, current Miami beach" story is old news. Bottom line is, we need a new story.

A risky combo: off-plan investment + non-local developers

Every time I read about British buyers being creamed by this or that real-estate fiasco somewhere around the globe (more often than not in Spain, or at the hand of Spanish developers), somewhere in the first or second quote from the hapless buyer is a mention of "dreams destroyed". But beyond the archetypical fleeced Briton, and considering our real-estate universe here in Punta, the subject of off-plan, or pre-construction sales is worth contemplating carefully.

In the land of no-credit-no-mortgage, off-plan is the status quo, more or less the only way to develop, and a way to ease the pain of having to pay for a property in cash.

The way it works is the buyer signs a purchase commitment with about 10% to 20% down, proceeds to pay monthly installments for some 18 to 24 months for about 30% to 50% of the value until completion and possession of the unit, at which point the buyer either pays the balance or takes on vendor credit at a moderate interest rate --compared with bank rates-- for one or two years. There are variations to this schedule depending on when the buyer comes in.

The attraction is the prospect of "built-in" price appreciation, knowing that as construction and sales go forward, the developers steadily raise the price of the remaining units, with anywhere between 15% to 20% appreciation being standard during normal times, and up to 100% value increase in the crazy times we're living. Not to mention the "forced savings" aspect of this scheme, whereby buyers undertake a commitment to pay off a property in a couple of years, while they earn or put some other property up for sale, while locking in the price of their purchase.

But of course there's always the risk of the building never reaching completion, and even, as mentioned in the article in The Times linked above, a very real risk of the project never breaking ground, regardless of economic or global financial conditions. Our Roosevelt Ave. still shows a few decades-old carcasses of past busts. The wonderful Acqua building was built on the site of a failed hotel, the Yoo tower is basically frosting on an "antique" concrete skeleton.

In the case of Spain, countless developers went broke, went to jail or pulled back from their plans as the market turned bad, leaving tens of thousands of "broken dreams". In Dubai, $24 billion worth of projects was cancelled or "put on hold."

But in Brazil and even in Uruguay, there is a pattern of foreign developers being the ones who stumbled and even failed in the recent downturn, and there may be a cautionary tale in this.

To begin with, the absence of legal requirements such as a bond guaranteeing the completion of the project means that once the foreign developer goes belly-up or simply packs up his tent and hops on the next flight out, aggrieved buyers have little to go against in trying to recover their money. It's lost.

But also, from a common sense stand-point, those developers are less likely than local ones to pull those projects to fruition when the going gets rough. They are less likely to have access to lifeline credit locally, due to their lack of commercial standing, and at home they might find their financiers less excited about a venture that is encountering difficulties in some third world country. "But my project is located in the most premium spot!!!" Well, that may mean nothing a few time zones and a hemisphere away.

In addition, the foreign developer often designs for foreigners, in effect shutting out the natural pool of buyers, i.e. locals. So they are faced with selling not a property, but a country first, then a development, and lastly a particular property, a much tougher and costlier proposition than just looking around at what sells locally, and aiming for that constituency.

I'd like to clarify that in Uruguay, "local" includes developers from Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Their background can be checked locally if they have a history in development, or in its absence, in their native countries, as "everyone knows everyone" here, and we can easily run a "creditworthiness check" from someone in Rosario, Argentina, or Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Difficulties are not limited to liquidity or finances, but also come into play in the operational sphere. Does your developer know the intricacies of the local approvals process? Or is he or she going to be doing time in bureaucratic purgatory, resulting in bankruptcy when the project runs out of cash and cannot generate sales due to missing approvals? Is your developer working with a well established local construction company with solid relationships that will ensure the project will not encounter labor troubles? (SUNCA, the construction union, seems to be particularly fond of striking or occupying sites owned by non-local developers).

In sum, the warning is that the attraction of buying from developers who "speak your language" may provide a false sense of security. You may want to make sure that they speak the local language even better.

An English speaking lodge in Minas

I have to confess that the concept behind this place is quite bizarre to me, but still, to each his own. Somebody might find it appealing to go to a place in the hills of Minas (Solís de Mataojo) to hear exclusively English spoken (by native speaking guests, as well as by other non-anglo guests wishing to hone their presumably advanced language skills.)

So for those interested, the place is called Mundo Inglés Silver and is located about one hour from Montevideo and from Punta del Este. The room and board rates quoted do sound quite inexpensive, from US$15 per night to US$25 per day, all meals included, and US$35 with tours.

Come to think about it, if it´s clean, and friendly, for those prices, who cares what language they speak...

There are pictures of the lodging and a lengthier explanation in the website.