Its so good to have a decent steak again.

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Thankyou for all your emails voicing your concern for my welfare and that of my Duty Free Havianas after my last blog. Fortunately I can share with you that I didnt get mugged in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I certainly received some envious, almost knowing, glances from the locals, which is understandable. That bling I added to the straps looks totally awesome. Does that sound too gay???? :-)

The flight from Rio to Monetvideo was safe and uneventful, just how we like it. Although at the Montevideo airport I was impressed with a large ad on one of the walls for a brand of bread named Bimbo. The idea was to get Dom to stand next to the Bimbo brand name so I could take a photo. I looked around for her and there she was inadvertantly walking down the escalator that was travelling upwards, much to her embarassment. Oh the irony.

We booked into our hotel which was named Plaza Fuerte. I booked it after seeing it on a travel show on Foxtel. The hotel is a 1920-30´s model in the art deco style and was in the old but trendy part of town. It had one of those really old lifts (yes even older than the ones at Police HQ) which would only take 3 people at a time and if you moved around in it too much, I think it would have come crashing down. Our room had a 12 foot high double door at the entrance and 16 foot ceilings. We had a balcony over looking the street and once I stepped upon it, there were great views downtown or the crap sights if you looked the other way. We even had cable television, yes this was upmarket for us. Whilst Dom was having a shower I flicked through the various channels and inadvertantly located the Rated X Playboy Channel. I couldn´t access it without a password ( not that I tried, that is what the menu told me). The problem was that I couldn´t back out of the channel. I turned the TV off and then back on again and it was still the the Rated X Playboy Channel. So when Dom exited the bathroom, there I was frantically struggling with the remote control, stammering that I wasn´t really accessing porn whilst she was in the shower.

We were invited up to the bar on the top floor of the hotel (the 5th floor) for our complimentary drinks. The bar had an entrance to an outdoor area on the rooftop which provided spectacular panoramic views of the city. Montevideo is a very progressive city, it has daylight saving and as such the sun didn´t set till around 9.00pm. In our 2.5 days there I didn´t see any faded curtains or confused cows either. Since we have been travelling around South America I have told plenty of fellow travellers about Perth and how we had to have a referendum to decide if we should have daylight saving, and they just stare at me in disbelief and honestly think I am joking. Anyway we sat at a table on the hotel rooftop, enjoying our complimentary white wine and enjoying the sunset. When I say we, I actually mean my Duty Free Havianas and myself, as Dom was still downstairs sulking about her flight seat not being upgraded and me accessing porn. Actually thats not true, Dom did share the rooftop with us, but I should be allowed to display a little bit of artistic licence, it´s my blog and I will tell it how I want to.

The following day we explored the city. Montevideo is a very beautiful city in parts, but it could be so much more. In many ways it reminded me of Paraguay, in that it has many very old buildings, which if maintained by the locals inhabitants, would enhance each respective city so much. Yet in the end, both cities are much like an older woman who is unsucessfully trying to recapture the beauty of her past.

The city has a huge amount of hippies lounging around at makeshift artisan stalls, selling all sorts of stuff that there isn´t really a market for in the first place. We also noticed a huge amount of rubbish left in the streets, parks and fountains of the city, which does nothing to enhance it for tourists. Now if I was in charge of the country I would pay the hippies basic dole money to do some meaningful manual labour and clean up the rubbish in the city, and it would be a win win situation for everyone.

I don´t want to put the place down too much though as I would go back their in a heartbeat. There are plenty of parks and greenary, the architecture is stunning, it is right on the coast, the people are very laid back, casual and helpful and the weather is perfect, enabling shorts and t. shirts to be worn the entire time.

I was hanging out for a decent steak. I hadn´t eaten a big thick juicy steak since we first arrived in Argentina, 7 weeks ago. Everywhere other country we have visted in South America cooks steaks, but they are always very thin and they just can´t compare to their Argentine counterparts. Not so in Uruguay, they are big cattle breeders like their neighbours in Argentina. Therefore, for lunch we went to the local market which is famous for its beef. The whole market consists of restaurants set up like bars where they are cooking Carne Asada´s, basically cooking all sorts of meats on open wood fires. The smell as we entered the market was enough to get the taste buds going, then when we were able to view all the meats on display being cooked on the open grills, we couldn´t sit down quick enough. I ordered the biggest steak I could find on the menu and Dom ordered her fave which is the BBQ ribs. Our meals arrived and were huge, Doms BBQ ribs covered her entire plate, and they provided seperate plates for our fries and salad. As usual we couldn´t eat all our meal, but we ate so much that we didn´t need dinner in the evening. My one litre bottle of Stella Artois beer cost $4.00 AUS and the whole meal came in at under $45.00 AUS. It would have been even less if we ate our meal at the counter instead of a table and even less again if we didn´t eat what we thought was the complimentary fresh bread. A bit of a trick for young players I think, but I´m not complaining.

After two and a half days in Uruguay we hopped onto a ferry named Atlantic III to take us to Buenos Aires. Actually it was more of a high speed, dual hulled craft that held about 300 passengers and even had a duty free shop on board, disappointingly it didn´t sell Havianas, but it had a great selection of chocolates. I felt a bit cautious riding on a boat whose name ended with the letters IC and also shared plenty of other letters from the word TITANIC. But we had a good trip, there were no icebergs, and the only downside was that there was no access for passngers to go outside and stand on the deck and feel the wind in their face. Overall it took us about 3 hours to return to B.A, Im not sure of the distance between the respective capitals but we covered a fair bit of water in the 3 hours we were travelling. By the time we arrived in BA it was late so we checked into our hostel in the Monserrat area and just chilled. I will update our B.A travels later.

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