My particular reason for visiting Uruguay was curiosity. As a sixteen-year-old high-schooler, my wife Kay went to Montevideo as an exchange student. Off and on, she’s mentioned what an adventure it was, how it boosted her self-confidence and had her experience a summer very different from one in Michigan. Kay has given me a good feeling about Uruguay, and I wanted to see for myself.
A note from Kay: After reading Eric’s write-up about his time in Uruguay, I read my daily journal from the two months I spent there as a summer exchange student when I was 16 going on 17. Up until then, I’d been a wall flower, or as my best friend in Montevideo put it, a “flower wall.” In Uruguay, I blossomed, living an active social life with the girls and boys in my school and others I met along the way. So many parties and other get-togethers! Lots of talk and dance, no alcohol but lots of cigarettes (my one puff was enough to convince me to never smoke). My first almost boyfriend. Looking back, I can see how the experience helped me become the person I am today.
I didn’t stay long, and apart from a one-day guided tour to the historical town of Colonia, I spent my hours in the capital of Montevideo. My hotel, a large Radisson conveniently located on the city’s principal square should have been excellent. The ways that it wasn’t are, in retrospect, almost comical to think about.
Arriving with my backpack and heavy case at the hotel’s entrance, I faced a flight of steps with no employee to welcome me and help with my luggage. The receptionist gave me a key to a room on the 14th floor and when I asked for the location of an ATM, sent me to the casino in the rear of the hotel’s lobby where he said he had gotten cash in the past. Searching in vain through the glitz of the casino, I finally asked an employee who said there was no ATM. A day later, I found one, not in the casino, but down a flight of steps near a side entrance to the hotel.
That first evening, I was hungry and not wanting to go far, I ordered a light meal in the lobby restaurant. The indifferent service was slow, and when the food finally came, it was awful. When the waiter brought the check, he pointed out when I could add a tip. I left that line blank.
I was tired and fell asleep almost immediately and was awakened by a series of strange clicking noises coming from the window area. It wouldn’t be until the next day that I discovered that the problem was caused by the aluminum window frame that made noise when the wind gusted against it.
My room was large and well-appointed but felt old and worn, the bathroom towels especially. Given that I would be staying for only three nights, I shrugged off the irritants.
The following morning, I was picked up just before 9 by a woman named Marcella, my guide for a day-tour of the southwestern town of Colonia del Sacramento, a much touted UNESCO Heritage Site. I took a seat in a large bus next to a Brazilian woman, whom I would get to know during the course of our day.
We were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty on the bus, and for the first hour of the three-hour drive, our guide spoke non-stop in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. I had trouble understanding her much of the time. She spoke too fast, and her diction was not great. At one point, I asked her to slow down. That said, I did get the main points of her commentary. Besides me, there might have been only one other English speaker on the bus. Most seemed to speak Spanish as their first language.
The bus traveled west along Route 1, and, at first, what I saw from the window looked pretty shabby. Small, low houses with flat roofs of the kind I had seen in other countries on this trip. Things improved as we progressed, and by the time we passed through San José province, there was much evidence of agriculture. Uruguay raises cattle, sheep, and pigs.
My seat mate, whose name is Eurides Maria Freites was 64 and, as I learned over lunch, has four adult children and six grandchildren. She spoke Spanish well but very little English. We conversed in my broken Spanish and her bits of English.
An hour before we reached Colonia, we made a stop at a place called Arenas Farm in order to tour a small museum of objects collected by Senor Arenas over much of his life.
There were cases on the walls containing thousands of key fobs and even more thousands of pencils, lettered and decorated in countless ways.
There were also hundreds of ash trays collected from restaurants and hotels in many countries. Large numbers of perfume bottles, pins, and match books filled out the walls of the museum. Another building sold souvenirs and two kinds of cheese made from the farm’s milk.
Driving into Colonia, we stopped outside a remarkable-looking circular structure made of brick whose walls were pierced with doorways shaped like keyholes. The Plaza de Toros del Real de San Carlos had been built as a bullring by a rich man about 1905. However, due to rivalry between political parties, the plaza had been closed for more than one hundred years and is now open as a venue for concerts and other cultural events.
Another stop we made was near the estuary, Rio de la Plata, where large white letters spelled COLONIA. Tourist magnets like this are common throughout South America, and many from our bus took their selfies in front of the sign. I was interested in the estuary that was so wide at that point I couldn’t see the far shore. It reminded me of last summer’s trip to the Thousand Islands in the St Lawrence Seaway except that here there were only two islands that didn’t seemed to be inhabited.
The highlight of the tour was Colonia’s Old Town that we entered by a stone gate dating back to the time the Portuguese had founded Colonia in 1680. Then, it had been a fortress, and the gate and a section of stone wall are the only reminders. Old Town doesn’t encompass a large area. There are a few houses dating from the Portuguese period, but no Portuguese descendants live there. At some point, the Spanish took Colonia and developed it.
Although Colonia del Sacramento is small, it has some picturesque cobblestone streets. On a short walk, Marcella showed us the uninteresting Plaza de Armas and a plain-looking church built by the Portuguese.
Soon we were on our own for a couple of hours. As it was lunch time, Eurides and I sat at an outdoor table and studied our menus. Marcella came by and helped me read mine. I ordered a plate of stuffed pasta balls something like tortellini that were filled with ham and cheese and topped with a Bolognese sauce. My new friend ordered a breaded piece of chicken that had a filling and had been fried. It was large, and she ate only a little bit. I finished my plate, drinking water and glasses of a good, light white wine. We took our time talking and afterwards walked on Colonia’s main street a short distance, shopping for souvenirs. We stopped for ice cream at what Marcella said was the best place in town. My cup of vanilla was delicious. I was back in my room at the Radisson shortly after 6 o’clock. I wrote an email to Kay with a brief description of the day.
I went down to the lobby bar for a glass of wine. Halfway through my glass, one of the wooden legs of my bar stool snapped off, sending me down and onto the floor on my back. I was helped up and fortunately was not hurt. Had I broken something, the hotel would have been liable. This Radisson was a strange place. When I told her about this event, Kay was shocked that the staff hadn’t offered to pay for my glass of wine.
The following day’s tour of the city was excellent. Our guide Virginia spoke both Spanish and English clearly, and what we saw and learned during our three hours together was rewarding.
There were fifteen or twenty of us on a smaller bus, and several spoke English, including a Brazilian couple in late middle age who were traveling on a BMW motorcycle. Another, younger couple from Columbia live in Newport Beach, California and were traveling with the cutest seven-month-old little girl named Luna. They were fun to talk to.
We began by circling the Plaza Independencia, in the center of which is a large monument to José Gervasio Artigas, Uruguay’s national hero who led the fight against the Spanish. Soldiers in period uniforms guarded it.
Directly across from the Radisson, a two-story building with a bright facade had housed the country’s government.
Next to it, a larger modern building contained the current president’s office.
The most imposing building on the square was the tall Palacio Salvo, built in 1928 as a hotel. I loved its towering architecture.
The Spanish founded Montevideo in 1724 with a fortress to keep the Portuguese in Colonia from expanding east. There still stands a remanent of a fortress gate backed by one of modern design facing the Plaza. Uruguay has a population of 3,400,000, about half of whom live in Montevideo.
We passed the Mercado del Puerto, an old market containing meat restaurants, and stopped at the Mercado Agricola.
Under its iron superstructure were a couple of nice fruit and vegetable stores. I bought a ceramic disc with a design by Uruguayan artist Torres Garcia. It will hang somewhere in our apartment to remind Kay of her youthful adventure. I also bought a bottle of tennat, an unfamiliar varietal that I would sample at the hotel.
Our tour took us around the city to upscale neighborhoods. We stopped by the city’s largest soccer stadium with its unusual tower.
The Monumento a la Carrata is a remarkable bronze ensemble of oxen pulling a covered wagon stuck in mud. The human figures are settlers from the past with their animals.
Montevideo is also situated on the Rio de la Plata, whose water is colored by sediment. Where we stopped, we could see Positos, the city’s densest neighborhood, across the water.
The end of the tour dropped me at El Forgón, a restaurant several blocks from my hotel. It was lunch time, and I was hungry. I loved the ambiance of the classy restaurant and ordered a small steak and mashed potatoes. While I waited, drinking a goblet of the house wine Cabernet Franc, I nibbled some delicious amuse gueles that included garlic toasts and a kind of liver sausage that I really like. My waiter was charming. He brought my steak beautifully cooked medium rare, and a potato purée made with cream and butter. So delicious! For dessert, I ate a dish of vanilla ice cream.
A sad note that evening was that I had invited three friendly guys from Guyana to join me at 6 o’clock to share my bottle of tennat, a national favorite. I had arranged a table near the bar with four glasses and the open bottle. I waited more than half an hour for my invitees who didn’t show up.
Another sad note was an announcement from our friend John in Michigan, saying that Bill Sandy had passed away in his 90s. Bill had been such a presence in my life during the 1970s and 80s. It was at his company, a year after he founded it, that my professional career as an industrial filmmaker took off.
April 25th. It was a long travel day back to Argentina. I left the Radisson in a taxi that dropped me at the Buquebus Ferry Terminal much earlier than I needed to be. Having remembered how crowded it was in Buenos Aires, I thought I should get there early. There were many fewer passengers that morning than there had been before. Fortunately, I had a novel.
On the ferry, I discovered that my first-class ticket gave me access to a special section in the bow of the boat with luxury seating and an upscale refreshments bar. I helped myself to a flute of champagne and a piece of cake. There were tables, as well, so I sat at one with my computer and wrote a short piece about Buenos Aires and sent it to Kay for review.
During the crossing, what had been a heavy overcast turned to rain. A couple of squalls covered the windows and reduced visibility to zero. Off the boat after 11 o’clock, I got into a taxi driven by an old man missing half his teeth. I asked to be taken to the aeropuerto while he kept saying aeroparque. He was correct in that domestic flights leave from a second airport. I was confused and hoped he was correct, and he was.
My destination was the city of Puerto Iguazú in the far northwest of the country. The famed Iguazú Falls would be my penultimate tourist attraction before flying home. I was happy that I could see the end of my Latin American journey.