2 steps back in time in Montevideo

We arrived in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay after another night on the bus. We had sleeper seats again so it wasn't too bad apart from being woken up in the middle of night at the border crossing to have our passports checked.

We were only staying two nights here and we had booked into a really scary looking, old hotel in the historical part of the city. It was actually really nice though, we didn't encounter any ghosts.

We spent the first day doing our usual thing of exploring. The area around the historical centre was quite cool with lots of bars, restaurants and market stalls lining the streets. It felt very old fashioned and we thought that maybe we'd slipped back in time to the 1920's. We then ventured out of the historical centre to walk up the main commercial street of Montevideo, like their vesion of Oxford Street. It was horrific. It was dirty and very polluted and the buildings were ugly. The shops were selling utter rubbish and most items were at least twenty years out of date. It was like stepping back to 1980's in this part of of the city. However if you're after a moblie phone thats bigger than your face or an ill fitting tweed jacket with shoulder pads this is the place to be.

We decided to head back to the 1920's. We went to get a drink at one the cafes near our hotel. The decor was very out dated and the waiters were all wearing bow-ties and had tea towels tucked in their trousers. It was very charming although it was playing 80's pop music, it didn't know which decade to belong to. We decided to try a Submarino. We'd heard a lot about them, they are hot milk with a bar of chocolate melted into it. Delicious.

In the evening we went out for dinner in one of the more modern looking bar/restaurants. It had a big screen playing music videos all of which were again from the 80's. We think that maybe they are so far behind the times that Men at Work and Bananarama have just made it big here.

We didn't do much the next day. We ventured back and forth between the 20's and 80's a couple times and went back the strange cafe we'd been to the day before. We thought it would be wrong not to go out again in the evening as the area near our hostel was the main centre for bars and nightlife in the city. We went to one of the most popular bars which had a Lord of the Rings theme and was called Pony el Pisador. It repeated the trilogy of films on a big screen all day, every day. Considering we were in the main bar district of the capital city the area was very quiet although this bar was one of the busiest. We were excited when we realised that there was going to be live music that night so we ordered another bottle of wine and waited for them to start.

We were expecting some authentic Uruguayan music but it was a two piece act both playing electric guitar and singing along to cheesy backing tracks. They seemed to know every single song ever written by man and when they realised we were English they played Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles especially for us. It was good fun and we were treated to other classic tunes from Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton amongst others. We stumbled back to our hotel to get a couple of hours sleep before leaving for Colonia del Sacramento the following day.

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