el telescopio

Tuesday night we went to our local planetarium to use their telescope. It's open to the public but not apparently publicized -- we only heard about it from the security guard who started chatting with us on our visit to the planetarium. We emailed (in español!) the society of astronomy aficionados which manages the telescope and Carlos said we were welcome to check it out any Tuesday or Friday from 8pm to 10pm. Of course the sky turned cloudy Tuesday but we didn't want to pass up our appointment.

Carlos and José Pedro took us up into the telescope tower, a squat white silo on the grounds of the planetarium. The telescope itself is a beautiful cylinder of blondish wood with rings of brass, about 15 feet long. It was built in 1851 by Henry Fitz, a telescope maker in New York City. According to our guides it was brought to Montevideo by a British ambassador in the 19th c. and how it ended up in the little planetarium on Av. Rivera I'm not sure.

Since it was cloudy we spent the whole time talking politics, travel and food with our two aficionados. José Pedro, whose family is in the meat business talked about selling beef to both Israel and Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. He said they had to have both a kosher area and an area approved by a Muslim inspector (he said the animals had to face Mecca). Apparently the Muslim inspector kept finding fault with everything they did until he fell in love with an Uruguayan woman. They got married and his complaints ceased.