![\"election](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/election-day-lunch.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1\" "\\"election")
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Last sunday there was a national election in Uruguay.\u00a0 For weeks political parties and supporters had been vigorously campaigning with public rallies in key spots, lots of noise and flag waving particularly on weekends and evenings.\u00a0 In addition to a 48 hour media blackout before voting day, (welcome but it didn’t have much effect on the noise and printed\u00a0leaflets\u00a0pollution) another feature was the ban on liquor sales from the evening before until after the close of polls.\u00a0 Which was probably a good thing – things\u00a0 were lively enough (but very orderly)\u00a0without that complication.\u00a0 I don’t know how all restaurants handled this but where we had lunch on sunday, when we asked about having wine, were were told we could buy a bottle\u00a0but it\u00a0could not be on the table and\u00a0would have to stay out of sight in the bar,\u00a0\u00a0and it would come served in coffee cups… which we\u00a0found interesting and quite acceptable.\u00a0 So this is us just finishing off our meal; we did not stay for coffee <\/span><\/em>and dessert\u00a0as there was some fresh icecream\u00a0waiting at home… ;-p\u00a0 Interestingly there was only a fraction of the usual number of sunday lunchers there, and I later heard a news report that most people voted as early as possible and then spent the rest of the day with family (sunday custom) at home having an asado\/BBQ – and the weather was perfect for that.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 no party gained the 50%+1 votes and so there has to be a runoff election at the end of november – all has been pretty quiet this week with behind the scenes alliances being formed, strategies planned and so on between the two front runners who will face off – but very soon the noise, colour and movement will accelerate again – wonderful news for the printers and admen who have been working overtime these past few months…Whoever said an election\u00a0was good for the economy seems to have made\u00a0a reasonable claim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last sunday there was a national election in Uruguay.\u00a0 For weeks political parties and supporters had been vigorously campaigning with public rallies in key spots, lots of noise and flag waving particularly on weekends and evenings.\u00a0 In addition to a 48 hour media blackout before voting day, (welcome but it didn’t have much effect on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-ak","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}