Laid back Montevideo

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Day 117: Sleepy Montevideo

I arrived at the port bright and early, and having checked in my luggage and cleared immigration, I boarded the boat, hoping to use the journey as an opportunity to catch up on sleep. Used to the roaring temperatures of Buenos Aires, I hadn´t really planned my trip across to Uruguay so well and had failed to put a jumper in my hand luggage. With icy cold air conditioning blasting out from all angles, the chances of getting any sleep were fairly slim, and I spent a miserable three and a half hours, goosepimply and shivery all the way to Montevideo.

I was quite relieved when we finally arrived in Uruguay, and back in the lovely sunshine, I collected my luggage and walked to the hostel, a lovely old building in downtown Montevideo. Having organised my accomodation rather late in the day, I was in a mixed/male dorm, but I´m sure it´ll be fine for a couple of nights. I changed some money in town (at a rate of 42 pesos to the pound, very complicated), and returned to the hostel for a little snooze, which lasted for a good four hours. I spent the evening going for a proper wander around town, Montevideo certainly seems like a nice place, with lots of really old colonial buildings. The locals come across as being pretty laid back, and the obsession with carrying around hot flasks of water and ´maté´ cups is much more apparent here than in Buenos Aires, as people here there and everywhere are sitting on benches or standing on street corners drinking the stuff and sharing maté with their mates! The fondness of maté here is interesting, I know the British are meant to be obsessed with tea, but we don´t wander round with flasks of the stuff! Generally, the whole atmosphere is a bit more chilled out than Argentina (apart from the guy sitting next to me watching dogfights on Youtube while I´m typing this. Scary). I hung out at the hostel this evening, making a bit of an effort to relearn some spanish verbs, before doing a supermarket shop, buying two carrier bags of food to last me a couple of days, for the total sum of about three pounds. Bargain.


Day 118: A bit of culture

I was woken up quite early by the sound of a horse and cart going past outside the window, doing it´s daily rubbish rounds! Being a cloudy day, I thought it´d be good to visit the gallery of Uruguay´s most famous artist, Torres Garcia, and spent a pleasant morning looking around the paintings there. I´d decided that I wanted to travel back to Buenos Aires on the Sunday, ready to start at the language school on the Monday. The guidebook suggested that I book my passage out of the country a day or so before, and with an open return ticket, I thought I´d have no problem getting a seat. It´s a good thing that I erred on the side of caution, since arriving at the ticket office at the port to book a seat, I found that everything was fully booked apart from a few spaces on the boat leaving at ten o´clock the following (Saturday) night. I was a bit miffed that I would have to get the night boat and arrive back in Argentina at the rather unsociable time of two o´clock in the morning, but without too many options, I booked it anyway.

Back in town, I went to the Plaza Independencia and visited the giant underground marble mausoleum of Jose Gervasio Artigas, the ´father of Uruguay´, sited under an equestrian statue of Artigas and watched over by a guard twenty-four hours a day. Having had my fill of activities for one day, and past the time for my usual afternoon nap, I head back to the hostel, where attempts to book a place to stay in Buenos Aires for the following night proved quite difficult and required actually calling around a number of places. I really must start planning ahead more.

I didn´t do too much this evening, and after a good sleep, cooked some pasta and stayed up talking to some of the people at the hostel, one of whom was an ex-Montevideo resident and keen to suggest some places for me to visit the next day.


Day 119: Cafes, cakes and Catnaps.

It was another cloudy day in Montevideo, and when it started spitting with rain, I figured that the beach probably shouldn´t be top of my itinery for the day. As recommended by one of the guests the night before, I walked through town to the Gaucho Museum. Annoyingly, I soon found that most of the city´s attractions were closed on a Saturday, with my plans to spend the day indoors looking around old artefacts and pictures subsequently thwarted. There started a bit of a cafe crawl, starting with an early lunch, and moving on further into the centre of town, where in the absence of much else to do, the small pastries in the bakeries proved to be just too tempting, and with a small selection, I headed down to the sea front and sat overlooking the ocean, reading a spanish book, realising that I´d forgotten how to conjugate regular verbs in the present tense, and consoling myself with sweet treats! Back in town and another refreshment stop later, I wandered around some of the shops, my favourite being the chocolate and alcohol shop, selling fabulous truffles and handcrafted easter eggs, alongside sherries, wines and chocolate. Fantastic! With the weather not improving, I headed back to the hostel and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening there watching Manchester United thrash Newcastle with some of the guys working at the hostel, before falling asleep on the communal sofa, waking up a couple of hours later.

I hadn´t much been looking forward to the getting the boat back to Buenos Aires, and it has to be said, I´ve had better journeys. After the faff of checking in my luggage and clearing immigration, I boarded the ferry and found myself a seat. Although I´d remembered to keep a jumper in my hand luggage this time, sleep proved to be quite difficult for the first hour or so, as the boat was overrun with small children. Yes, it would seem that the ten o´clock boat from Montevideo to Buenos Aires is the preferred time and method of travel for families with young children. They seemed to be everywhere, running round screaming, crying and tripping over things (and that was just the parents). Fortunately, things settled down after an hour or two and I managed to get a bit of sleep, helped by the boat being delayed by forty-five minutes and finally coming into dock at quarter-to-three.

Retrieving my luggage, I saw that the taxi queue was a little on the long side, and wanting to get to my hostel at some time before daybreak, I thought I´d walk the main part of the way down the main road, and then hail a cab for the short stretch through the backstreets. Still on the main road, but only seven blocks from the hostel, there weren´t so many people around and so I hailed a cab. Despite giving him the address of my hostel, and telling him it was down the road, the cab driver was determined to take me for a round trip guided tour of the city, taking me about five kilometres out of the way. It´s very hard to express annoyance when very tired, in a language that you haven´t really grasped or practiced very much in the last few years, especially at three in the morning. I did manage to explain to the driver that I had been in Buenos Aires before, and refused to pay the full fare. Grrrr taxis.

At the hostel, which fortunately turned out to be rather nice, I checked into my dorm, and went to the bar to wind down with a beer. Having gotten talking to the guy working there, we were joined by a Venezuelan guy, studying English in Buenos Aires, and his mother. With my spanish and his english, which were about the same level, we started talking about Venezuela. He did his best to convince me that Caracas (his home city), is actually a safe tourist destination. Having heard stories to the contrary from various travellers I´ve met on the way, I´m still not entirely convinced and a bit nervous about the whole thing. Although he did reassure me a bit, I don´t think he really realised that tourist experiences of a city are likely to be somewhat different to that of a local´s. Anyway, he was pleasant to talk to, and was happy to give me a long list of things to do and places to visit (and where to avoid), I also got his mum´s phone number in Caracas and an invitation to stay there if I want to! Wanting to get some of my money´s worth, I finally got to bed at about half five!

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Comments

[Sanita]

Funny
it does sounds like a rather funny excursion to Montevido!!!...I am amazed by your interest to visit museums though!