Montevideo - Let´s do the time warp!

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And so to Montevideo..... had a feeling we had entered a time machine. It is just so dated and stuck in the 70ｴs. At first we thought it was the hotel we were staying at - it was a mock style castle walls, everything patterned and in brown. There are photos of the room so you can see for yourselves when I finally get them loaded. We sauntered off to the tourist office to see what Montevideo had to offer. Apparently a walking tour of the old city to view all the different styles of architecturefrom Neoclassical to our favourite historical eclecticism. In other words anything which does not fit in to the other 15 categories they had - most of them we had never heard of.

It is an old town though - the people are old, the styles in the shops are old and the buildings are old. You have a feeling that everything was going well and suddenly time just stopped here in Montevideo. We did the tour and resisted entering one of 20 museums! Not that there is anything wrong with museums - it was just that the subject matters were bizarre. Quite frankly I am not all that bothered about finding out about Uruguay in prehistoric times. Anyway in the evening we went off for a Parrillada (all the restaurants have open fires) and we had steak with stuffed red pepper with melted cheese and bacon - heaven. The beef though was a bit chewy and still a little disappointed with it though I still have high expectations for Argentina! We also found a bar playing live Uruguayan folk music - not bad for a Monday night. Some of the locals wanted to practice their English on us and we bumped into an Amsterdamer - the world is a small place!

Next day and we had the BEST meal so far this trip! It is in the Mercado del Puerto - near the docks. It used to be a meat market and now it is lots of parillada restaurants. You can sit at the bar and watch them cook your meat for you while you sip medio medio - sparkling white wine blended with white wine. It was sublime! We had read up on Morcilla Dulce, sweet blood sausage, which i was dying to try. It was just sooooo good. We also tried chorizo and other types of sausage and stuffed pork It was all just so good that I had a huge grin on my face for ages afterwards.

Unfortunately the weather was terrible - really pouring down with rain. So no more walking tours for us! We went off to a shopping center on the other side of town. Gave us an opportunity to see some of Montevideo protected by the rain only to discover that it is not all in a time warp. It looks a lot like every other town we have seen in SA. The shopping center itself had lots of shops with more modern fashion though again the people shopping were older and there were still a lot more shops than you usually see catering for older fashions. We reckon everyone must move to BA for work.

Everywhere we went we were met with friendliness by the Uruguayans. Montevideomight be a little old and faded but we certainly had fun there and it is worth a day or two on anyone´s trip.

Photos can be seen at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/foodiefloozie/my_photos

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