On Christmas Eve and Christmas, the hours of different services, such as transport and shopping malls, are affected. Today, Saturday, urban buses will begin to reduce their frequency at 7:00 p.m. and the last departure will be at 7:30 p.m., according to the Montevideo Municipality. On Sunday there will be special hours. The information for each line can be consulted on the website of the Metropolitan Transport System (STM), selecting the options special hours on Christmas Eve and special hours on Christmas Day.
In the same sense, the union leader of the National Union of Workers and Transport Workers (Unott), Luis Aguirre, informed Telemundo that the frequency of suburban and interdepartmental buses will also begin to decrease from 7:30 p.m. In the case of taxis, the service will be affected from 9:00 p.m. “Companies put guard on the 25th,” he said.
As explained by Óscar Dourado, general manager of the Unique Taxi Union, the personalized attention of telephone operators will not be available from 10:00 p.m. on Saturday until 2:00 a.m. on Sunday. However, the rest of the automated tools for requesting the service will work as normal, he clarified.
The union leader estimated that on the 24th there will be 50% of the fleet working, so the service will be “greatly diminished”, while on the 25th it will rise to 70%. Meanwhile, it will be reinforced in the Tres Cruces terminal and in the Port of Montevideo, by Buquebus and cruise ships.
The Tres Cruces terminal will work normally until 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, from there the services will begin to drop according to the distances of the destinations. In the case of Sunday, around 60% of the buses will not work. On the Tres Cruces website, the schedules of the buses that will be active are detailed.
On the other hand, the malls on the 23rd will be open until midnight. But on the 24th they will have special hours, they will be open from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and on the 25th they will be closed.
Ambassador of China: pandemic slowed down the progress of the negotiation towards an FTA
The Chinese ambassador appreciates that the pandemic has slowed down the progress processes for a free trade agreement (FTA) between the countries.
Wang Gang said this Friday that “these processes are complicated because it is a state-of-the-art FTA, very comprehensive, and it requires many internal consultations, that is, at the level of the interior of China with the various government departments, with the sectors, with the unions, with each of the items; and that takes time.” And he added: “And also, we know what happened in China with the pandemic, so far it has not yet normalized.”
The Chinese ambassador in Uruguay explained that work has slowed down. «As you say, you have to have Chinese patience. Dress me slowly because I’m in a hurry,” he said. He indicated that his country is in favor of globalization, free trade and has signed 19 FTAs with 26 countries. In Latin America, the Asian country has an FTA with Chile, Peru and Costa Rica. “With Colombia we have a feasibility study that has been going on for 10 years and has not yet finished, while with Uruguay we finished the feasibility study in 10 months, that is, making a comparison of this nature, we went quite quickly,” he said.
On the other hand, the government headed by Luis Lacalle Pou announced that there will be changes in the conduct of the free trade agreement negotiations with China. The measure is adopted in an attempt to reactivate the dialogue with the Asian country.
Thus, the Uruguayan ambassador to Germany, Gabriel Bellón, will lead the negotiations starting in February. The Foreign Ministry reported that it will succeed Fernando López Fabregat, current chief of staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who will assume the vacant diplomatic functions in Germany.
Bellón is a career civil servant, he held the position of director general for integration issues and Mercosur, he was also Uruguay’s chief negotiator with the European Union between 2016 and 2017.
