MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY--Friday, December 13, 2013

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Thursday, December 12^th--At sea, sailing toward Montevideo, Uruguay

Got up late and did the usual activities for us on a “down” at-sea day.

We are constantly surprised (not sure why??) at the many ways that the cruise ships make extra money besides the previously discussed assessed gratuity of $25 per stateroom, per day, to offset their employee wages. As soon as there is a day at sea, the tables come out around the pool for the sale of T-shirts at 2 for $20, and handbags, scarves and watches for $10. As you know, there are art auctions, it seems almost daily. Who goes on a cruise to buy art?? How do you get the fine art pictures home?? Then there is the jewelry. Same thing as far as we are concerned; however, they must sell enough as they have it on all the ships we have sailed on. They charge extra if you want a meal in a different restaurant even though you have paid for meals in the price of the cruise. I believe I talked about portion control on this line before. You are served what the server believes to be a portion of whatever food you wish and you have to ask for another serving if you want it. Chicken breasts and fish are not playing card size servings, but cut more like a 2” by 2” inch square.

Of course the casino brings in rolls of money from the gamblers on board, but classes like wine tasting and cooking you also have to shell out for. The spa services are advertised daily with displays set up around the pool, flyers in your room, and young women trying to sell you the services as you walk through that area to get to another part of the ship. All the items ordered from the bar--sodas, wine and hard drinks come with a 15% added gratuity--and people do drink a lot. I have mentioned wifi at .75 a minute, or you can buy packages that start at 100 minutes for $55. Bingo is played at 3 cards for $20. The ship photographer is everywhere (even on ship excursions) and sells photo packages and CDs of your trip at hefty studio prices. I guess what I am trying to say is that the cost of the cruise listed in a brochure or on-line is in no way the TRUE cost of a cruise when everything is added up.

Enjoyed the show tonight. Just singing, but this ship's professional singing voices and their song choices were very pleasant.

December 13^th. Happy Friday the 13^th!--Montevideo, Uruguay

Clear but warm day.

This port/city is very easy for tourists to access. You walk off the ship and follow a green path through the port’s “plaza”, for lack of a better word, and you are in the old part of town. This plaza has a display of items taken off a German warship, the Admiral Graf Spee, which was scuttled by her captain early (1939) during WWII. She had fought in the Rio Plata off Montevideo with British ships and all were damaged. The Captain thought his ship would be captured, so he destroyed it instead.

We crossed a main street and caught a hop-on, hop-off bus for $25 each. The bus circled the whole city on a 2 plus hour tour. We could have gotten off, but didn’t as the buses ran only every hour and we didn’t know of anything (like a museum) we wanted to take an hour to see. There was a running commentary in several languages, but the English speaker wasn’t very clear with his pronunciations and often was off from describing a site—either too soon or we had passed it. The first bus stop was at the Plaza Independencia where a stone, Citadel’s Gate, marks the division between what once was “old town” and the new parts of the city and has a large equestrian statue of national hero Jose Gervasio Artigas. So, although we really enjoyed what we were seeing, we didn’t always know what we were seeing--a big government building, but city, state, federal??? Some buildings were very elaborate taking up more than a block and we know, therefore, they were significant, but we are not sure what their purpose was. We did catch that one was the Legislative building like our US Capitol.

The bus traveled through downtown where several street markets were set up, residential areas, several huge parks, by ball stadiums, by a number of big, modern shopping malls, by fountains and statues in the middle of the street or along in the parks, and through a very upscale housing section of mansions in many different architectural styles—in the Prado neighborhood. Most of the streets were lined with very large trees even the downtown streets. There was some graffiti in places, but nothing near as bad as some Central American Cities we have been in. My impression of Montevideo was of a very pleasant city spread out over a number of low hills with lots and lots of green space. It seems less cosmopolitan with a slower pace than other two major South American cities we visited. This is a place you could easily live in.

We made our way back to the port riding along the very upscale River Plata waterfront area called “Pocitos” with posh apartment buildings with the beach and harbor just in front. Saw several birds and some ducks in some lagoons, but we were not quick enough to get good pictures of them. Valerie was very frustrated on this bus tour because it seemed that every time she wanted to take a picture, we either passed it too quickly or one of her fellow passengers managed to get a part of themselves into the picture.

After getting off the bus back where we started, we walked through an adjacent open shopping plaza kind of area where several arts and crafts booths were set out. We bought a picture/print of some gauchos from a very talented artist working there. We then strolled into the Mercado del Puerto, an old market building of iron and glass built in 1868. It was absolutely filled with a number of grilled meat restaurants and people packed into this space eating lunch. Look at the pictures and you will see that there were no walls between the restaurants just all of them shoved together. This was definitely NOT just for tourists, but where the Uruguayans ate lunch every day. Fascinating place! Each of us bought a T-shirt from two women selling from a kiosk in the middle of the chaos.

After managing to make a weak wifi connection in the visitor’s center, we walked back to the ship in time to have lunch in the Lido. Valerie then went up to take pictures of this very busy harbor.

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