New Apartment and Uruguay

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Greetings,

I've been in my new apartment for less than a week, and I really love my new location. I'm close to everything I need and in a more dynamic part of the city.

My grandfather died two weeks ago, so I was back in the US (in Florida) for about a week for his funeral and to be with my family and grandma. The death was hard for everyone, but it was good to spend time with all my family together, which doesn't happen too often.

After getting back from the US last Monday, I quickly packed up my apartment on Tuesday and moved on Wednesday morning. Then on Friday morning I left for a previously planned Rotaract exchange trip to Uruguay. I attend weekly Rotaract meetings here in BsAs and I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in their exchange trip with another Rotaract club from Montevideo (the captial of Uruguay).

We took a ferry across the Rio de la Plata to a small town called Colonia del Sacramento. It's pretty much directly across the river from BsAs. People think BsAs is on the ocean (I did too before coming), but it's actually at the wide mouth of the Rio de la Plata as it empties into the Atlantic. From BA, Uruguay is about a 3 hour ferry across the river. Further north in Argentina, where the river is much thinner, there are bridges that connect the two countries and you can drive across. Colonia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it was the original Portuguese and then Spanish colony in the area. The are still some of the original colonial buildings and cobble-stone streets and it is really very pretty. The old neighborhood is on a peninsula that juts out into the river and there's a large lighthouse from the last century. We spent Friday night in Colonia and then took a ~2hour bus ride to Montevideo the next morning to meet up with our Uruguyan Rotaract hosts.

We toured Montevideo on Saturday. The architecture and style of the city is very similar to BsAs. Uruguay had lots of the same immigrants as Argentina and a similar history, and there's lots of contact and flow between the two countries, so a lot of things were pretty similar. The city seems to take more advantage of it's coastline though, and it's cleaner than BsAs (and they have strongly enforced no smoking laws!!!). We had lunch at a market at the main port (fried calamari and fish stew!) and walked around the city. On Saturday night we made a big asado (grilled steak) at our hostel for us and our hosts and then we all went out to a club together. On Sunday everybody woke up late, spent the day doing more tourist stuff, and then we had a pizza party with the Uruguayan Rotaract club before catching a late night ferry back to BsAs. The trip was a lot of fun and I'm really fortunate to have gotten to go. I took some great photos and hopefully I'll be able to put those (and my Iguazu photos) up soon. My dad sent me my missing camera cable a few weeks ago, so it should arrive soon.

Meanwhile, me and several other Ambassadorial Scholars here are still working closely with one of the local clubs to put together a service project. What we've come up with is to help set up a library at a local public school, which are sorely lacking in resources, especially in the poorer neigbhorhoods of the city and rural regions of the country. We're now trying to locate a school and get the details put together so that we can start a fundraising drive (details to come!!!) to finance the project.

Everything else is going well here. I continue to enjoy my experience and am honestly learning new things everyday. I have my final exams for my second trimester in two weeks, so I'm going to be pretty busy hittin' the books for the near future . . . wish me luck!

-Chris

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