Four Days in Montevideo, Uruguay (April 2014)

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12 April 2014 – Saturday – Montevideo, Uruguay

We saw little of the scenery on our overnight bus journey from Rosario to Montevideo, Uruguay. Even when crossing the border at 4am was more like a highway toll stop than a border crossing. The bus attendant woke us up enough to collect our passports and then returned them to us a few minutes later. It rained throughout the night and we slept much of the journey.

When we arrived at the Three Cruces bus station we were met by the bright and bubbly Veronica, whose apartment we were staying in for the four nights. She helped us with the ATM and escorted us to the local bus which deposited us a couple blocks from her apartment. She had been living here with her boyfriend of ten years, but after a year-long volunteer work visit to Romania and then trip throughout most of Eastern Europe, they decided to break-up after returning home to Montevideo. (Long-term travel either destroys or cements relationships. We are still very happy travellers and were commenting that last night was our final long bus journey in South America and that we would miss the continuing adventure into the unknown when we returned to Europe.)

Veronica is a teacher’s aide and was renting out the apartment to earn some extra money and then staying with her sister nearby. We dropped our suitcases and other gear and she took us to the ferry terminal to purchase our tickets to Buenos Aires. Joan had read that the tickets on the ferries often sold out and as Easter was approaching she wanted to ensure that we had them to hand as soon as possible. When we arrived at the ferry station ticket office, it was packed with people. It was more like an airport terminal, with people lining up to check their luggage before boarding the ship. We had a stong coffee with Veronica there while waiting and then purchased the tickets for Wednesday’s 3 hour journey across the Rio de Plata river.

The ferry port of Montevideo is at one edge of the historical city centre. Also located there is the Port Market which was the original feeding place of the local dockworkers but which has been transformed into a restaurant food hall specialising in grilled meats. It was full to bursting with people tucking into thick steaks and half-chickens and long racks of short ribs. We settled into a table and La Chacra del Puerto and worked our way through a juicy and tender steak and a rack of ribs, accompanied with a bottle of Uruguayan Cabernet Sauvignon. With a bottle of sparkling water, the total price was 1370 Uruguayan Pesos (about 60 US Dollars).

The sky was a dull grey and misty. As we browsed through a few of the touristy gift shops the mist matured into rain and we retreated to the apartment. Even though we slept on the overnight bus journey, we didn’t really get enough proper sleep or rest so we had a nice long afternoon siesta. It was still raining when we woke so we hung out at the apartment reading, writing, internet browsing and later finished off the leftovers from the big grill lunch for our dinner.

13 April 2014 – Sunday – Montevideo, Uruguay

Sundays are usually market days in South America and Montevideo, Uruguay is no exception. We visited their Sunday market on Tristan Naravaja. It stretched the entire length of the street. Arts and crafts, fruits and vegetables, bookstalls (nada libros Anglaise) and copy dvds, clothing and jewellery. The street itself houses more than a dozen second-hand bookstores in the old buildings lining it, only one of which had a few old Earle Stanley Gardner novels featuring Perry Mason. The market was very crowded. It was here that we first noticed people with a flask tucked under one arm and a cup-sized gourd with a silver metal straw sticking up in it from which they were sipping. They would pour steaming hot water into the gourd which was packed with a tea-like leaf. This, we later figured out, was mate (pronounced ‘mah-tay’). Mate is a caffeine-rich infusion drink of dried Yerba mate leaves are dried, chopped, and ground into a powdery mixture called yerba. The bombilla acts as both a straw and a sieve. The submerged end is flared, with small holes or slots that allow the brewed liquid in, but block the chunky matter that makes up much of the mixture. There were many stalls at the market selling these sets and we later noticed stalls on street corners also selling them. Although mate is also a popular drink in Argentina, here was our first experience witnessing it.

Another Uruguyan tradition is the ‘Chivito’ sandwich. It is so popular here that it is known as the ‘national dish of Uruguay’. It consists of a thin slice of churrasco beef that must be tender and pounded thin. The bread should be a small kaiser or Portuguese roll, with a crisp exterior but a soft crumb. Piled on top of the steak is lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise, melted mozzarella cheese and a fried egg. Some chivitos also contain roasted peppers, grilled onions and a spoonful of chimichurri salsa, freshly chopped, on the top.

The word "chivito" means "little goat" in Spanish, and according to the story, the dish was created in the 60s when an Argentine asked a restaurant owner for a dish of roasted goat like the one she was accustomed to back home. The chef had no goat, but he slapped together a sandwich and topped it with a little of just about everything in the kitchen. It was a hit, and the Uruguayan sandwich-eating public never looked back.

Online reviews of this sandwich use words and phrases like ‘amazing’, ‘unparalleled deliciousness’, ‘the best sandwich ever’, and ‘incredible’. Being a sandwich-lover, I had to try at least one! Luckily for us, one of the top places in Montevideo to experience this sandwich is Paponita’s, according to Trip Advisor reviews, and it was very near the Sunday market area, and like the market it was full of people enjoying themselves. Paponita’s is a no frills family-diner-type restaurant. A long counter with stools over-looked the wood-burning grill and kitchen, with the large room filled with rows of small tables. The food being served was piled-high on the plate, with a small mountain of french fries as its base. I ordered a chivito and Joan had a single hot dog, which seemed to amuse the waiter. (All the waiters were men in their 40s and 50s and dressed in white shirts and black trousers and vests.) A litre bottle of one of the local Uruguayan lagers, Patricia, was plonked down on the table and it was followed quickly thereafter by the two sandwiches.

While the chivito was interesting and tasty it was also a bit disappointing and it was definitely not the best sandwich I have ever eaten. This prompted Joan and I to reminisced about the truly great sandwiches we have eaten during our journey over the past 14 months: pastrami at Katz in NYC, roast beef at Brooklyn Diner also in NYC, meatball sub at Luigi’s in Lewiston, Maine, muffalato in New Orleans (the best thing about New Orleans in Joan’s opinion), spiced beef and pastrami at Schwartz in Montreal, the pastrami and roast beef sandwiches we had with Georgie in LA. These were all sandwiches that live long in the culinary memory and are reasons in themselves to return.

We walked back to our apartment in the historical city. This part of Montevideo is sadly neglected. Many of the old Spanish colonial buildings are derelict and crumbling into ruins.

When we returned to the apartment we learned that there was a massive fire in Valparaiso, Chile in which more than a dozen people have died and thousand of houses destroyed. We had been in that coastal city a couple weeks’ previously. This is the second time recently where natural disasters seem to follow in our wake: the earthquake in northern Chile in March and now this fire. We also recall there was some horrendous weather in Texas shortly after we had passed through it. We accept no responsibility for any of it: weather is getting weirder the world over! We slept soundly in our quiet apartment.

14 April 2014 – Monday – Montevideo, Uruguay

We started out today with a list of things to do and places (mostly museums) to visit.

Our first stop was the Museum of the Andes which documents, commemorates and honours the victims of the airplane crash in 1972 in which 29 Uruguayan lost their lives. The plane was carrying the Uruguayan rugby team to a match in Chile when it struck the edge of a volcano in the Andes mountains. The survivors endured 72 days of ‘hell on earth’. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Their story was recounted by Piers Paul Read in the book ‘Alive’, published in 1974 and in 1993 made into an internationally-renowned film directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. The museum exhibition contains items from the crash and photographs taken by the survivors. There is also a timeline comparing what was happening in local (Latin American) and world affairs (the war in Vietnam and the protests in the USA) at the same time as the search for the missing plane was taking place. It is a private museum, one man’s labour of love. We walk very slowly through the museum and reflected on the tragedy and the unspeakable decision the survivors had to make in order to survive.

The next item on our agenda was to get the camera fixed. The button which snaps the shutter and operates the zoon snapped off yesterday. We visited several camera shops in an attempt to have it repaired. (At one camera shop was a sign on the counter stating repair service hours 9-12 and 3-6. I presented the camera with the broken piece to the attendant. It was 12:10. The attendant would not serve us or even offer us any assistance except to say we had to return at 3pm. When we did return at 3pm, the same attendant looked at the broken piece on the cmera and shook his head, ‘nada’, he didn’t have the part and couldn’t repair it. Why he couldn’t have told us that at 12:10 ...). We found out that this week was a holiday week and that many service oriented businesses were closed. We have to have a camera (I know feel quite unbalanced if I don’t have it to hand) so we purchased a small cheap Olympus to get us through the remainder of our journey.

Lunch was at La Cucina del Pedro, a restaurant from Joan’s researched list. Pedro’s Kitchen is a mid-range restaurant and offers the standard fare of steaks and pastas. It was less than half full when we arrived and we were seated and immediately presented with a small slice of toast with a very tasty meat paste topped with a nest of fresh alfalfa sprouts. A basket containing a lovely assortment of very nice fresh breads was placed on the table. The national drink of Uruguay is something called Medio y Medio (half and half) which consists of sparkling wine and regular wine. We ordered one glass to try and when the very friendly waitress with excellent English suggested that it was cheaper if we took the whole bottle we quickly agreed. Medio y medio reminded us of a Spanish cava. The menu also offered the Uruguyan national dish, the Chivito sandwich, which I ordered so I could compare it to the one I had yesterday, while Joan had two grilled pork chops with a salad. The grilled pork chops were very tasty, as all grilled food tends to be, but nothing special. The Chivito sandwich was good: the thin steak overhung the bun in all directions and the cheese dripped down its sides. The Medio y medio washed it all down very smoothly. We shared a desert that consisted of four forms of chocolate – white chocolate mousse, chocolate mousse, a brownie and chocolate ice cream – all rich and decadent. We finished neither the pork chops nor the wine and brought both home for dinner to accompany the tart we had purchased earlier in the day at a confiteria called La Nueva Barcelonesa.

Later that evening we stirred ourselves to go out again and headed to a long-established pub called Bar Fun Fun. Alas, it was closed – no fun at Bar Fun Fun on Monday nights! We returned through the deserted streets to our apartment and spent the rest of the evening reading, writing, browsing on the internet – the usual stuff!

15 April 2014 – Tuesday – Montevideo, Uruguay

We headed out early again this morning with the best of intentions to visit the museums we didn’t manage to visit yesterday. Montevideo has many small interesting-sounding museums, mostly within walking distance of the historical centre where we were staying.

Our first stop was the Gurevich Museum. Jose Gurevich was born in Lithuania 1927 and moved to Uruguay when he was four years old. He was a well-renowned painter, muralist and sculptor who died at the very young age of 47 of a coronary occlusion. Unfortunately for us, the museum was undergoing renovation and closed to visitors.

Nearby was the Torres-Garcia museum, another museum dedicated to the works of a singly Uruguayan artist, Joaquin Torres-Garcia. This one was open and we spent a pleasant hour browsing the four floors of a wonderful building containing his works, including murals and cubist portraits and children’s toys. Many of his brightly vivid, cubist images are seen on sack-cloth bags and wooden jewellery boxes and t-shirts in the gift shops of Montevideo.

We were so impressed with the tart we had purchased yesterday at La Nueva Barcelonesa that Joan decided she wanted to return today to buy two more for lunch. It is located in the commercial centre of the city and en route there we stopped at a few more bookstores and a store called the Music Palace that could only offer me one musician who could be labelled as a Uruguayan jazz musician, Hugo Fattoruso. Hugo had started his music career in the mid-1960s in a band with his brother Osvaldo, Los Shakers, that was Uruguay’s answer to The Beatles.

We purchased two more tarts and a desert at La Nueva Barcelonesa and made our way back to the apartment via a secondary road that ran parallel to the main shopping boulevard. There a man had a small folding table covered with old books, one of which was Nevil Shute’s classic novel about the end of the world, ‘On the Beach’ which Joan had never read and which I would happily re-read and we purchased it for the equivalent of 50 cents.

After lunch – the tarts were delicious and the desert heavenly – we had our now standard siesta. It was too late to visit any of the other small local museums. Instead we walked down to the waterfront where there was a long breakwater lined with men fishing with long poles. We walked out to the end and back again, shooting a few photographs along the way (one of which I am very pleased with) as the sun began to set and the fishing boats returned to port. We stopped for a coffee and I flipped through all the local newspapers – no live jazz on Tuesday nights in Montevideo (although Avishai Cohen is bringing his trio here to play in the magnificent Theatre Solis at the end of April). We returned to the apartment where Joan made a delicious carbonara for our dinner. We debated going to the Fun Fun Bar but couldn’t stir ourselves and spent the evening reading, writing, browsing the internet, and Joan got out her pencils and did some drawing in her sketchbook.

Tomorrow we catch the early ferry for the 3 hour crossing on the River Plata to Buenos Aires (imagine a river so wide it takes three house to ferry across it!).

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