An Uruguayan Blast from the Past:

This past weekend I went on a grand adventure to Uruguay. I visited two different cities, Montevideo and Colonia del Sacramento. Both were so different than Buenos Aires and so beautiful. I took A LOT of pictures and I wish I could include them all here but this entry would go on forever! I much preferred Colonia del Sacramento over Montevideo so I’ll focus on the time I spent there in this little post! But quickly, Montevideo is one of the biggest cities in Uruguay and you wouldn’t know it because on Sundays it looks like a ghost town. I took the picture below to show how Montevideo literally STOPs on Sundays.

Ghost town Montevideo

This is the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen. From the front of the bus from Montevideo to Colonia...I chatted it up with the bus driver.

  

[Back to Colonia…Picture yourself in a quaint colonial town in autumn. There was a light morning rain and the day is now overcast yet the air is cool and crisp. The brightly colored yellow, red, and orange leaves that crunch under your feet on the cobblestone streets make up for the lack of color in the sky…]

Ok now that we have set the scene, we can dive into the beautiful city that is Colonia. We kept referring to it as Halloween Town, like from the Disney original movie. It felt like it was time to carve pumpkins and drink pumpkin spice lattes…a personal favorite. When I asked for one at a coffee shop, I got a very strange look. 1. Because I didn’t know the word for pumpkin in Spanish at the time (calabaza in case you were wondering) and 2. Because pumpkin spice lattes just don’t exist in Uruguay or in Buenos Aires for that matter. I’ve found it interesting that I associate specific things from the states with types of weather. Even though it FEELS like fall/winter here, it is still June and July and Halloween and Christmas are far away.  

Anyway, we arrived in Colonia on Sunday night and stayed in a beautiful Radisson in the middle of town. Showering and sleeping in a hotel was quite a treat. We went to a restaurant called The Drugstore (shout out to Dad). It was such quirky, eclectic place with fun things decorating the walls. Dinner was delicious and frankly the amount of food was a little overwhelming. We had planned to go out after dinner but we all suffered food comas and crashed soon after returning to the hotel. 

Montez, Delaney, and Kenny across the table at The Drugstore.

Janet, a little bit bummed about the rain.

The next morning it did rain a little bit which was a bummer, but we made the best of it. I, being the rebel that I am (hah.), opted out of taking the walking tour around Colonia with our program and my friend Janet and I decided to take a tour of our own. We spoke with some natives in stores and restaurants and gathered some cool information that way. We took lots of pictures of the antique cars that decorated the streets and even had our own funny little photo shoot with a couple of the beautiful wooden doors paired with stone buildings. I wondered why Colonia gave me such dejavú and after talking to a waiter outside of a local restaurant I learned that Colonia del Sacramento is the only Portuguese colony along the Rio de la Plata. The houses are built in Portuguese style and resemble old Lisbon. I only spent a short amount of time in Lisbon, Portugal last summer during a layover, but this community reminded me SO much of the Island of Terceira that I fell in love with last summer. 

Check out those pensive shots...and the really cool houses of course! WAY more fun than a walking tour con un guia que no entiendes!

 

 AH! Forgot to mention some interesting cuisine that Janet and I tried in Colonia. It is called Tortas Fritas and it is just a big delicious piece of fried dough. You can only buy them from street vendors and they are SUPER cheap. 1 Torta Frita only costs 10 Uruguayan pesos. The Uruguayan peso is 18 to 1 to the American dollar, so it only cost about 55 cents give or take.  

YUMMM.

I was sad to leave Colonia and return to the big city on Monday night but Buenos Aires is where I belong for now. Colonia is only a 45 boat ride across the Rio de la Plata…so maybe I’ll go back! When I got back to Buenos Aires, I put my big city girl pants back on and ventured out to find a bus (there are probably about 300 hundred or more DIFFERENT bus lines to choose from) nearby that would get me from the port to somewhere close to my apartamento. I was successful in doing so and am now safe back in Buenos Aires.

Gracias por leer mis amores,

Katy