Windy Season Uruguay

So, again it has been a while since I updated this but here is an update. No photos yet again, I will have to do that when I get back home. So last I wrote, we were enjoying the rain in Florianopolis in the south east of Brazil. We did get one day of clouds with no rain that was suitable for a walk on the beach, down a dirt road, through some woods and over some sanddunes before we had to head out for the 18 hour bus ride to Montevideo in Uruguay with a short stop over in Puerto Alegra which was a very unfreindly unpretty city, for the three hours we were there. We finally did arive early one morning in Montevideo, and we are lucky we did because there has been serious flooding in south east Brazil since we left and the road to Uruguay is unpassable at present.

We spent one day in Montevideo wandering around the city, seeing the sites and stocking up on bikinis for our impending beachfront vacation. Montevideo is a very relaxed city with many old buildings that have been abandoned and left run down, and that appear to be gradually being restored into high-end condos and offices. They have a great waterfront that somewhat resembles Miami Beach in a 1980´s detective show with rows of massive palm trees and people running and walking and playing soccer and drinking matte (the last two I suppose are not so miami-ish and it was not at all glitzy or glamorous like you would suppose Miami to be: just nice and relaxed and very very very windy. After seeing the sun go down over the water we waited several hours at our hostel for a so called all-you-can-eat assado (uruguayan barbecue) pizza extravaganza, when it was finally ready, we got once piece of barbecued pizza each, (thin crust and crispy and good) eventually we got another piece, but by the third 2 by 2 inch helping our chef started to be amazed the we actually wanted more... so we eventually got shamed out of actually eating all we could eat...

The next day we headed off to Colonia which is a beatifull small historical port town, that was nice to explore and relax in and really very very very beatifull. And also very very very windy.

Next we back tracked through Montevideo and made for Punta Del Este, a fancy beach front town that is supposed to be humming with celbreties and beatufull rich people in high season but which was all but deserted when we were there. We stayed in a neigboorhood about 20 minutes out of the city called Manantielles. Patricia had to spend the whole week attending a conference on shallow lakes, and I was stuck with the very daunting task of doing absolutly whatever I wanted for the whole week which went essentially like this: Walk to the conference hotel with the conferencers, swim in the fancy conference hotel pool, walk a few meters to the beach, get harrased by the excesively strong wind and watch the excessively huge waves, walk down the beach for a while, walk to the store, buy some food, walk back to the house-hotel we were staying in, swim in the pool there, study some spanish, relax, eat etc... There was also some salsa dancing and various other kinds of dancing and since I have to mention food in some detail, there was also a few authentic home-made by real authentic Uruguayans, Uruguayan Assado, which involves barbecuing a lot of meat, cutting it up in to small peices, passing it around the table and eating little bits at at time, randomly applauding the guy at the barbecue and drinking beer and whisky with ice. That was nice.

I have to say that Urugay is a very awsome country. Everywhere we went just seemed very calm and chill and relaxed and freindly. People actually stoped us in the street to ask us if we were lost and tell us how to get where we were going. And everyone is addicted to matte and walks around with a mate gourd in hand (the thing they drink the yerba mate out of) and a thermos of hot water under their arm (the thing they use to allow themselves to be constantly drinking mate all day long). Maybe this is why they are very relaxed but in short it was a very nice country oh and also very windy, but I might have already mentioned that.

After my very relaxing week in Punta I was all recharged to make the stomach-turning boat trip back over to Argentina on a catamaran in the middle of a big storm, walk around Buenos Aires for about 8 hours straight, and fly to Ushuia (way way down south) at 5 oclock in the morning which is where I am right at this very moment. And now I am going to go have a nap in our room that smells like a long-distance bus bathroom stall. Aside from the smell in our room it seems very nice here. I will write more when I have been here for more than two hours.