Uruguay and Montivideo

The following weekend, I set off with Joe and Brandon (two American guys from the language school) to Uruguay. We took the slow boat across the Rio de la Plata to Colonia and then took a bus to Montevideo.

It was quite a strange city with some really nice buildings but also a lot óf drab grey tower blocks that looked like they´d been lifted straight out of Communist Russia. When we arrived in mid-afternoon, there were hardly any people in the streets, which made a nice change from permanently busy Buenos Aires. We explored the city for a while on Saturday afternoon and then headed back to our hostel, which was very cheap like most things in Uruguay. Dinner consisted of us each eating a giant Calzone pizza with at least an inch-thick layer of cheese in the middle in a really nice restaurant. Needless to say, it was only the influence of alcohol that allowed us to heave ourselves up from our seats and head back out into the city.

We then had a couple of drinks and chatted to some locals who were trying to sell us things (fair play to them). I was talking to one guy in Spanish about Uruguay´s best footballers. Apparently, former ManU man Diego Forlan is the big name at the moment. Spanish is so much easier when you´re really interested in the subject matter of the conversation!

The next day headed back out into the streets of Montivideo, which were once again deserted. Just when we were starting to think that Uruguay's population was a figment of its government's imagination, we stumbled across one long street that was absolutely packed with people wandering through a market. Poeple were selling everything at the market, which added to the feeling that Uruguay was slightly down on its luck. It seems that Uruguay's economy is closely tied to that of Argentina and so the latter's currency crisis of a few years ago hit Uruguay hard. However, the level of culture in uruguay has been maintained as the same street contained lots of bookshops, with their windows full of books on philosophy and economic theory. The notion of a people clinging to intellectual traditions in teh face of adversity is only half of the story. In the afternoon, it started to rain heavily, so it was decided that we would go to a cinema and catch a film in Spanish. Our taxi driver therefore took us to a large shopping mall in the suburbs. This contained loads of expensive European and American clothes shops, which were being perused by loads of well-dressed, apparently wealthy Uruguayans! We had no idea what was going on, it was like a different country. By the time we had left the mall and wandered back to the bus station, it was time to leave and so we never got to the bottom of this vastly different scenes in the same city.

Since leaving Uruguay, various people have asked me what Montivideo is like and whether thy should go. All I've been able to say is that Montevideo is "interesting" and "fun" and that's all I'm going to say now!

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