Uruguayan Travels

So about my time in Uruguay…I spent my first day wandering around the capital, Montevideo.  There’s really not many specific things to see or do there, but I met some people at the hostel and we walked through the historic area, along the beach, and through a nice park.  I really like Montevideo because it doesn’t feel like a big city.  It’s really safe, the bus routes are easy to understand, and everyone walks around drinking mate.  It was quite common to see people of all ages carrying their thermoses of hot water, bags of tea leaves, and special mate pots with the traditional stirring straw with them through the streets.  And these tea-drinking habits are not just for women.  Even the young, hip men carried their matching mate thermoses and pots with them as they went to meet up with their friends, and groups of guys sat together on benches passing around this traditional beverage.  Someone staying at my hostel offered me some, and it was a very, very, strong flavor; a little overwhelming but not bad at all.  It would be like making black tea and putting three teabags in a tiny teacup and letting it steep for 20 minutes maybe.

The next day I went to a beach town east of Montevideo called La Paloma.  Since it’s just the beginning of spring here now there were very few tourists there, and everything was pretty dead.  I did my first help exchange there with a really nice couple who ran a hostel.  They really didn’t have much work for me to do, but they let me come and stay for free anyway just out of the kindness of their hearts, and because they had done a lot of these exchanges when they were in New Zealand and I guess they wanted to help me out and practice their English.  I had a lot of fun there.  They lent me a bike to ride along the coast, and over the weekend some Brazilian tourists came to stay there, so we all had a fun time walking along the beach, playing cards, and hanging out.  The ocean was absolutely freezing!  So cold that if you stick your foot in the water it actually hurts, and if you keep your foot in the water for a few seconds (why did I do that?) your whole leg hurts.

After my stay in La Paloma I wanted to go to the interior to Uruguay, something that I regret not having done more in Brazil.  First I went to a town of about 3,000 people called San Gregorio de Polanco, which is right on the shore of a lake, and is a very nice, typical, small Uruguayan town.  From there I did a day trip to Tacuarambo, a larger city in the center of the country, just to see what it was like.  It was cool to see just a regular city that doesn’t have much tourism, but there really wasn’t much to do there.

Finally I went to Colonia del Sacramento, which is just across the river from Buenos Aires.  In the summer it’s full of tourists, but at this time of year it was dead as well.  During the first two days I wandered around the historic downtown (which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site), went to some museums, and went for a walk along the coast.  I’ve been to several museums here, and the thing that I love about Uruguayan museums is that they are tiny.  Usually when I go to museums I get bored after half an hour, at the most (unless it’s a map museum), but the museums here are so small that I can see everything before I get lose interest.  Even though the weather forecast predicted rain for the entire time I would be here, the first two days had several rain-free hours, and only today has been so bad that I haven’t left the hostel.  I wasn’t sure how I would pass the day until I discovered that they show American football on TV here!  Problem solved.  There was only one option, so I didn’t get to watch the Eagles, but the Packers/Redskins game was on.  I like the Packers well enough to enjoy watching them win, but even more satisfying than that was watching the Redskins get destroyed in the first half!