Nostalgia Night

[RPGPundit]

Nostalgia Night

Uruguay is a freaky country in many a ways... I've spoken before about the national drink, "mate". I've mentioned the club-forming habit, how you can't have three uruguayans in a room for more than 20 minutes without them forming a social club.
Now, I mention the holidays.
I may have mentioned it in a bitchy way before, talking about the national no-work holidays. Uruguay has them approximately once every 2 weeks, a "fecha patria" (day of the homeland); celebrating the signing of some constitution, crossing of some river, fight of some battle, birthday of some leader or other; its insane. For such a positively tiny country, and considering they're a third-world country in desperate need of working, do they really need 26 fucking national holidays? Not counting Christmas, or Easter?

But the holidays I speak of now are the ones that aren't the obligatory synicalist no-work holidays; but rather the real holidays. The ones people do something on.

Like Ñoqui day. The 29th of every month is a Ñoqui day. You're supposed to eat a particular kind of pasta on that day of the month, called Ñoquis, and leave the tip under your plate (if you're doing so at a restaurant), and you'll have good luck for the rest of the month.
Originally, this holiday was only on one 29th of a single month in the year (I've heard different Uruguayans claim different months), but then gradually that holiday got extended to be on EVERY 29th of every month that has one.  I guess that's inflation for you.

Today, Uruguay has another of its wacky holidays: El Dia de La Nostalgia, or Nostalgia Day.  Originally, it began as a ploy by certain nightclubs in Montevideo, as best as I understand it; seeing as how tomorrow is one of those obligatory holidays (fucked if I know what that one is about), the nightclub guys thought that the "Eve" of that holiday would be a good time to do a thematic evening where old music was played. Hence, Nostalgia Night.

Eventually, this became a city-wide phenomenon, and started to be about more than just the music. People started to dress in older outfits, TV shows spent the day talking about old things about Montevideo that are no more, waxing nostalgic about old soccer shoes or Catalogues from the London-Paris Department Store (long since non-existent).

So now, on Nostalgia night, you get a huge movement of people in all the hot neighbourhoods (Ciudad Vieja, Pocitos, Centro), crazy scenes in all the bars and nightclubs, and lots of thematically themed sillyness.

And what will I be doing this Nostalgia Night? Eating at Malakas for their special "Nostalgia Night Dinner", where they will be presenting the most classic dishes of various asian cuisines: sushi from japan, salad rolls from vietnam, vindaloo curry from india etc etc.

That'll take me back for sure.

RPGPundit

(August 24, 2006)