Bulgaria

After checking in our bags at the port in Buenos Aires our passports were stamped and we entered a waiting room for the catamaran that was soon about to take us to Montevideo. A guy at the entrance welcomed us: ”Welcome to Uruguay”. Oh, cool we were already in Uruguay even though we hadn’t even embarked the boat! A table filled with Fernet drinks was awaiting us in the waiting room. Excellent, we like this country already!

After a 3 hours’ smooth ride we disembarked in Montevideo, excited about finally getting to see this country after waiting for so long. While strolling the streets and looking for a suitable place to stay, a strange feeling gradually crept on us. We couldn’t quite figure out at first what it was, but then we decided that we felt it was unusually dark in the streets. The street lights were on, but still it was strangely dark. Very weird, like in some Jack the Ripper movie. But we thought maybe we were crazy and just imagining things.

After spending a few days in Montevideo we are finding that we like this town very much. We didn’t really have any expectations, but this certainly is a pleasant surprise. The overall feeling here is really relaxed, there are lots of cool restaurants, cafés and shops and the people are really friendly. A pleasant spice to the atmosphere is the numerous horses that they use here for transportation in addition to cars and buses. Many of the horse men actually seem to be people who ride through town collecting plastic, card board and other kinds of recyclable waste that they pull behind the horses in huge carts. What a great way to do recycling!

We’ve been trying to figure out what country this place resembles, because we both feel that we’ve been to some place similar before. Yesterday we figured it out: Bulgaria! Strange, but true.

A couple of days ago we visited Mercado del Puerto, a market packed with different kinds of restaurants and bars. It was a very intriguing place filled with energy and delicious smells. Many of the restaurants had huge barbeques filled with different kinds of meats, fish and vegetables, all on display for the customers to drool on. One of the most interesting places there was the famous Roldo’s bar that is the producer of the apparently famous “medio y medio”, half white wine and half sparkling wine. While we were sitting at the bar for about 45 minutes, numerous visitors came to the bar just to have a taste at the stuff.

Mercado del Puerto

Yesterday we happened to stroll into an Irish cafe for lunch. We got to talking to one of the owners and it happened to be his 30th birthday that day. And then boom, suddenly we were invited to his birthday party the same night in the bar. So in the evening we wandered back to the bar and joined the party. It was, shall we say, an interesting evening. As it turned out, about half of the friends of the guy with the birthday, including him, had been to Ireland as exchange students, so they all spoke more or less English. And they drank more or less beer, whiskey and vodka during the whole evening. And as the evening advanced and as the spirit bottles emptied people we more and more fascinated in talking to us and things got more and more interesting. Around 2 in the morning the party moved to nearby clubs and ended at an underground trance nightclub in the morning hours. What a great ending to our stay in Montevideo.

Ps. later we found out that the reason why it was so dark in the city was that there was a power shortage due to the drought... So we weren’t that crazy after all...