Montevideo
Trip Start
Feb 25, 2007
1
38
72
Trip End
Aug 25, 2007
Montevideo,
Uruguay
Monday, May 26, 2008
We all went for some food eventually, a chinese all you can eat buffet, as we have found, ´´all you can eat´´s are pretty good for saving money and getting lots of food. Unfortunately the one in our guide has been replaced by a shoe shop, but we eventually found another one.
There´s a fair bit of stuff to see in Montevideo, and over 2 days we saw the mercado del puerto (a huge undercover area of restaurants all with massive barbeques cooking literally tonnes of meat, every sort of meat imagineable and some which i didnt think people ate) We got a grill meal thing for 5 people, and got a massive dish of meat. Sausage, steak, chicken, pork, blood sausage, guts, wierd looking fatty stuff, it was really nice actually. Also we saw the parks, went on peddle boats in the lakes, saw the huge monument in the main square and underneath is an underground room with the famous Artigas' tomb in it. He is a national hero and lots of things are named after him, he fought towards a Federation of Provinces, one of which would have been Uruguay, but somehow is praised as the 'father of indipendence in Urugauy. We went to see the new Indiana Jones film, showed in English in a big cinema in Montevideo, they love theatre and film and all went mental when the film broke halfway through, clapping and stamping feet and walking out, we joined in and went downstairs to claim free popcorn. Eventually they fixed it and we watched the rest. I don't know if anyone has seen it but it was quite cool because a lot is set in South America and we recognised a lot of Peru, and also the Iguacu falls, even though Indy descended the three steps to the falls in the wrong order to which they actually feature on the river.
We went to a market on Sunday which was unlike any market we have been to in a while, it was definately not a touristy craft market. Just a market full of the most random junk which many locals seemed to be very taken with. One bloke whose stall we walked past near the start had a big bucket, a ladel, an ironing board, a bicycle wheel and a calculator. That was his stall, all layed out on a little cloth. This continued for a while, with lots of very wierd stuff, and then we did reach some more normal stalls, with food and clothes and electronics and animals and pretty much everything. It was massive.
We moved to a new hostel for our 2nd and 3rd nights, because the HI one (hostelling international) wwe had been in was too expensive, as they generally seem to be. We found a really funny little place, a kind of grand looking house which was falling apart inside and had lots of antique furniture and high glass and corrigated iron cielings with holes in. It was dirt cheap, we got a room for us 5, and the bloke who owned it, must have been about 70, dramk a lot of wine, and once he realised we weren´t american, absolutely loved us. He made us play guitar and sing and was a bit of a legend.
Its a nice city, small enough to be manageable on foot, but lots to do, we visited the football stadium aswell, supposedly one of the oldest in South America, host to the first ever world cup in which Uruguay were champions. It was very impressive, open topped, and we were allowed to walk around the empty stadium for nothing, we just asked a bloke outside and he told us to go to gate 11 and knock on the door - we did and a man came and showed us in.
