Alright. It’s ridiculous how long I’ve lazed about on writing this blog post…it needs to happen pretty badly. This post was supposed to be about Uruguay…well it will be. But I went to Uruguay 2 (nope, like 4 now, way to procrastinate, Luke) weeks ago at this point, sooooo the post will suffer a little in details. Oh well. Here we go, you petty mono-lingual English-speakers (and all you who speak English plus French or German or something). Also, let me just add that in retrospect this post is a huge mess of rambling, so…while it all happened, it’s probably very poorly written and as such will lower your opinion of my intelligence. As it should.
We planned this sweet trip to Uruguay. Two nights in Montevideo, the capital, the big city of the country, and one night in Colonia, which is the oldest city in Uruguay I believe. It’s a coastal town, a tiny little place with a lot of history that has become easily one of the main destinations for Argentinos that want to take a little jaunt across the water. Uruguay sounds like a big wild excursion, but in all actuality you can get there in under an hour from the port in Buenos Aires. We took the slow, massive, awesome, incredible, ferry, so it took 3 hours, but it was pretty quick anyway. That ferry had it’s own store, multiple bars and food places, and a really nice top deck area with a bar and lots of chairs (and a helicopter landing pad, they built that boat specifically for my needs!).
LOOKY!
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| SUP DUUUUUDES |
Also important to note…we spied a troupe of noobs dressed like crazy people from the 80’s. Turns out, they were crazy people from the 80’s! Actually, a band themed after like…Motley Crue. Leather, REALLY long hair (beautiful, mesmerizing) and lots of metal studs here and there …along with 4 men make up the band Gunner. They were headed over to Montevideo to play a show in Saturday. So we decided we had to go. I was definitely way excited.
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| I was trying to be sneaky and pretend I was taking a picture of Michael... |
We got to Colonia without much event, aside from meeting GUNNER and me whining LOTS about how heavy my bags were. My body hurt yo. Then we jumped on a microbus to Montevideo (having landed in Colonia), which was like 3 hours away. I decided to be the brave one and sit next to the random stranger. After about 1 minute thirty seconds of no talking to him I struck up a conversation with him, asking him if he was Argentine. Nope, I’d just met Pablo the Uruguayo, a Montevidean who lives in and has lived much of his life in Buenos Aires. A musician, I might add. He told me my disuse of my saxophone was “imperdonable” (unforgivable). He’s probably right. Anyway, my first impression of Uruguayans…incredible nice people. He gave me his number, and in case the service was bad he gave me his family’s home phone, told me where he lived, and said if I was ever lost of ANYTHING to give him a call. Talk about a nice guy…I’d just met him about an hour before when he gave me all of this. We talked for a really long time about Uruguay and Argentina and history and language and prisons and music and…so much awesome. So we arrived in Montevideo.
Beautiful city. Not a very big city, actually. Part of what I learned from Pablo was that there really aren’t that many people in Uruguay. It’s pretty comparable to the population of Oregon, believe it or not, which doesn’t have many people (look it up, children). It’s a port city, a beautiful place, humble but full of history. Another of my first impressions; some random girl of around my age kissing the air at me from a city bus as we were stopped at some intersection. “k, uruguay, k.” If there’s an incredibly useful and often used word by Argentines it’s “quilombo” and it means a mess. Getting to our hostel was a quilombo. The people at informacion turistica told us to go to come part of the old city to get to our hostel…so we took a Taxi there (nice taxi driver, all the taxis in Uruguay have a big protective glass shield dividing the back and front…weird). Turns out despite taxis being delightfully cheap, we were about 12 blocks from where we needed to go. Way to go tourist information, way to go. So we walked. After already complaining LOTS about how much my stuff weighed, it probably wasn’t fun to be around me. Sorry, friends. I complained lots. But when we finally made it and waited a lot of a bunch of noobs that didn’t have reservations or something of the sort…we FINALLY got in and found a pretty nice hostel. New, in fact. After unpacking and such we ended up having cool conversations with our room-mates. Two dudes from Puerto Rico, current residents of Buenos Aires. As we explained why we live in Buenos Aires we got to the part about where we take classes. (In Spanish): “Some place called FLACSO (our university/program home base)” …and they come back with “oh yeah. We work there.” So that was kind of funny and random. So with these two Puerto Ricans and an Argentine girl we discussed music, fútbol (that’s commie ball to you Americans!) and…well…Argentine Spanish, of course. And the hilarious phrases that exist within that language and dialect.
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| First glimpse of the city...Wow. |
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| Train tracks, obviously |
Now to speed up and hit some of these events:
Incredibly hungry we were…so we set off in search of restaurants and subsequently found that Montevideo was a ghost town for the weekend because it was Semana Santa and everybody was gone on vacation. After FINALLY finding a place to eat, we all got Pasta, with Michael and I LOVING the Ravioli’s we got…LOVING. I was MURIENDO/DYING of hunger and this plate/pan of ravioli was actually too much because it was such dense, filling food.
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| LOOKS GOOD |
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| It's like a happy meal, but good! |
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| I did what I could, and I could have finished but it wouldn't have been worth it... |
There was a party that night in the hostel, so we took a few hour nap and went to that. Lots of alcohol, but also lots of Coca-cola to mix it with, so I just got some Coke and enjoyed it. I discovered that Uruguayan coca cola MIGHT just be even better than Argentine Coca-cola, which is already past American standards. Woot. We also ventured to find an open store to buy snacks in (AKA cookies) and were successful. Woot.
Sleep.
Get up, find bicycles and exchange more Argentine pesos for Uruguayan pesos…and we hit the city. Renting bicycles was Michael’s idea, and he wins for it, because it was WONDERFUL. We were very mobile and got to check out lots of the ciudad vieja (old city), taking pictures here and there and there and here (mostly with my Ipod because my camera died early on). My only complaint is that my bum was literally bruised and quite sore after the whole day on a bike. And I’m out of shape. Success. Also, the Atlantic/Rio de la Plata is absolutely beautiful and the water is very brown. Lovely city.
Our final stop was some park, passing a stadium which apparently had a big fútbol game going on inside. Eat leftovers from the last night :D
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| Dinosaurio - Lead singer didn't like clothes exactly... |
That night we went to see Gunner, the band we met on the ferry over. This concert took place in some really trashy dirty cool hole in the wall venue in a dangerous neighborhood in the old city. Oh yeah. We ended up getting there and finding out that there was about 4 or 5 bands playing before Gunner. We waited, walked around, listened to some very different bands (metal, punk, bad punk, AC/DC type classic rock) and ended up leaving before Gunner came on when we realized that there was yet ANOTHER band going on before they came on (next day we were headed to Colonia and we wanted to get up and get going since it was our last day…and we were dead tired from so much biking). As we were waiting around outside, killing time, Sarah and Michael urged me to talk to one of the bands that had just played. They were the punk band, young(er than us), and seemed pretty chill. Some of their parents had come to the show (YAY PARENTS!) and we really wanted to talk to some people in Spanish. So I finally approach these guys and they end up just responding in English to me, because all of them speak English…well. One of these kids is from Brazil, lived in Germany a bunch so he’s fluent in Portuguese, German, English, and Spanish. Way to make me feel like a noob, kid. The other is the only Uruguayan, and he’s just…kind of a cool kid. Not sure what to say about him. The last one is the son of two Americans, born in Alabama. So I start talking to their parents and find out their Southern Baptist missionaries, from Arkansas and Alabama, and have been doing missions work for 12 years in Montevideo. They arrived not speaking a word of Spanish…and let me tell you, the few things I heard them say were spot on. Also their English was very heavily accented…southern accents. Apparently 12 years in Uruguay doesn’t do anything to your Southern roots. Awesome people, and at the end I approached them and had the opportunity to pray for them and their work. Huge blessing.
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| Metal, of some sort. What that man did with his voice was...terrifying. |
Next morning, get more change, get to the bus station, get our butts to Colonia! Colonia was beautiful, old, and quaint. A friend that had already gone to Colonia recommended that we rent a golf cart of some sort for the day, since it only costs about $45 (costs that after about 12, anyway, which served us perfectly)…and we did so. Our hostel was cool (bad bathrooms, though) and the golf cart was SWEET. So we got this golf cart, I got to drive to start with and we cruised to the middle of downtown to get ourselves some foods. I bought hamburgers, little did I know what I was buying was two patties with cheese on them and some French fries. Oh well, it was a decently good deal…
Then we perused around the oldest part of town on foot, seeing lots of beautiful, historical sites. Big success. Later in the day we hit the hostel back up, got re-geared, and drove to the north part of the town, up the coast. It was a beautiful, 15 or 20 min drive, and we arrived at the Plaza de los Toros, an old bullfighting stadium that was constructed in 1905 or so…and closed 2 years later when bullfighting was outlawed in Uruguay. It still stands, surrounded by fences to keep people out since the structure is deteriorating and some parts have fallen down. Sounds dangerous…so we find ourselves a way to get in and climb through a hole in the fence. Hey, we saw some random Uruguayan guys doing it too! Totally worth it. Beautiful place…lots of fun.
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| View from the hostel! NICE! |
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| Golf cart MADNESS |
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| Too lazy to make this face the right way. Some church or something |
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| Old VW Beatles galore! |
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| SUPER OLD cobbled streets. Rough stuff. We're talking some colonial era rocks... |
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| Oh, a lighthouse...that reminds me of home alright |
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| Oh yeah, THAT kid was there too...*sigh*, that kid |
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| I'm in the back of a GOLF CART |
When we headed home, we hit up the beach and caught the sunset. I kind of went my own way up the beach a ways and took lots of pictures...because it was unbelievably stunning.
That night at the hostel we played card games with people from all over the world (Elmer from Holland, good English, no Spanish) and two girls from Switzerland with perfect English, pretty good Spanish and some Indian language from one of them)…lots of fun! Then there was an Asado. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically a barbecue…but better. The meat is incredibly good, and there was lots of it…and we ate lots. Wonderful.
Later on yet we found us some ice cream, also a big win considering it was late…and went to bed, giggling and hyper but absolutely exhausted. Two hours later, about 3:30, we got up and walked ourselves down to the Buquebus port place to get in line for our boat. 4:30 Monday return to Buenos Aires (class at 12:30 :D). Not eventful, except for the fact that I needed to sleep and I DID NOT. NOT AT ALL. My friends did, they conked out…in FIRST CLASS. Big exciting random win…somehow we ended up with First class tickets. So that was comfortable. I had a lil chat with the lady tending the bar and changed some bills out so I could have a few of every kind of Uruguayan bill from 1 to 500 (remember, 20-1 Uruguayan pesos to dollars, not a lot of money) to remember it by. They’re pretty bills.
I took some sad, homesick time to go out onto the top deck with my phone for a flashlight and read the bible. That was wonderful, though there aren’t many words to describe it with other than very, very worth it and meaningful. Then I went back to my seat.
So here I am, sitting around on this ferry, looking at my reflection in the glass waaaaay above us, missing home and specific people like crazy, listening to music…waiting for the sunrise. Just relaxing…and all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I see LIGHT on the horizon. I JUMP up, grab my jacket and camera and run across the ship to the stairs and to the top deck again. LOOOOOOOK.
I stayed out there for a very long time and took MAAAAANY photos. Sunrise on the back of a ferry in the Rio de la Plata, looking back across the Atlantic…that’s the kind of memory of a lifetime sort of thing. No words…unbelievably beautiful. Way to go God; you created a masterpiece.
Then we were home, finally, and I got to bed as soon as I finally got home, after some complications with Taxi’s and things. I collapsed in bed (and my kitty Esmeralda came with) and napped for a couple hours until I had to get up and face the day. It was a hard day on the sleep deprivation with two LONG Tango classes, but given the amazing weekend I had in Uruguay, how could I ever complain?
So that’s another destination down. Montevideo and Colonia, Uruguay. Buena onda, boludos.
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