Lights, Camera, Accion!

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The rain returned as we were boarding the bus in Colonia to go to Monetvideo and continued all day, so we didn´t have the most auspicious start there. Again, it was too wet to bother with sightseeing, but we didn´t want to be stuck in our hotel all day, so we headed out to the commerical centre of the city to see if we could entertain ourselves for a few hours. And while I realise few places would be anything other than grim in such rain, we weren´t very impressed; it was far from picturesque and there didn´t seem to be anywhere other than huge greasy spoons to get food or a coffee - not great for a capital, really.

Day 2 was at least dry and fairly bright, so we set off to explore the Old Town, which is where most of the sights are. But again, unfortunately we didn´t find much. Yes, there were some pretty buildings, but also a lot of very derelict ones, slum housing and general squalor. We were pretty disappointed - the relatively few tourists that come here only seem to do so when they realise how close to Buenos Aires it is, but it was always on our itinerary, and somewhere we´d been really looking forward to since seeing it featured on "Holiday". In fairness, though, as I mentioned in our last entry, one of the main draws of Uruguay as a whole are the beaches (one of the world´s most exclusive resorts is just along the coast from Montevideo), and we were never going to experience it at its best in winter.

Just as we were about to write Montevideo off as a bit of a washout, however, we stumbled across a Hollywood film set!! We assumed it was just something local at first, maybe the news or an ad, and then Mark Ruffalo appeared, getting a final touch up to his make up! And just when we were getting over the shock of that, they started to film the scene, and he was joined by Julianne Moore! It turned out they were in town shooting scenes for the film "Blindness", due to be released next year. And the director is none other than Fernando Mereilles, who directed "City of God". I just can´t describe how surreal it was to be standing there watching the director of one of our favourite films directing two of our favourite actors. We hung about for 20 mins or so, watching Julianne, playing a woman who´s pretending to be blind, helping her blind husband (Mark) up the street and into a shop. An Oscar winning performance if ever I saw one!

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Photos

Action
Mark Ruffalo with a blonde Julianne Moore