Montevideo (Uruguay)
23-24 August 2012
24 August 2012
...And then the rain! There it was again, and now the return of that that familiar sense of foreboding, that chill and sense of the inevitable, it was in the air. I negated a few drops of rain in search of a cheap paragua, acquired the 'best looking' post cards of Montevideo that I could find (which are pretty freakin' ordinary, let me just say), committed to memory that a correo (post office) was nearby and sat across the road from the Plaza Independencia to write my cards out.
I'm sure that it was in that exact place, the very spot that I had chosen where all the rotten, downtrodden spirits that haunt this capital, collectively assembled and decided unanimously for this day that they would punish me so hard that I would mentally banish myself from this city forever, and to be fair, even though Montevideo had offered me a great time the day before the cards home were literally carrying the message that this place sucked balls, so perhaps I brought this strike of vengeance on myself.
'Puta madre!!!!!!!'
After a brief bout of souvenir shopping I walked back down to the old town, aiming up for another afternoon at the mercado. I headed into a Santander bank and tried to get out a few pesos from their ATM's, but nothing, they weren't accepting my cards...of course not!!...I left and headed for the HSBC that I'd located the previous day but remembered after a few blocks that I'd also left my souvenirs on top of one of the ATM's back at the Santander bank. Like a lunatic I ran back to the bank and thankfully found the bag located exactly where I left it. Whilst I was there I also managed to acquire some pesos out of the only machine that was accepting my card. I took out 500 Uruguayan pesos (equivalet to $24.50 AUD) and headed off - now remember that figure in your head.
Walking the 6-7 blocks to the mercado I entered one of the shops with the intention of getting my old man a 1930 World Cup replica shirt. I took out my wallet, was just about to pay with my credit card and then I saw it, my card was no longer in my wallet!!!! My monetary lifeline to all things travel related had done a Copperfiedl! Where the f**k was it!!!??? My brain did a quick retrace and isolated the problem, I'd left it back at the Santandar bank!!!!
'PUTA MADRE!!!!!!!"
Now before you say 'how dumb are you to have left your card in an ATM!!!??' let me just give you the low down. At an ATM in Oz you put your card in, carry out the necessary transaction and your card is returned BEFORE you receive your cash! In fact you don't get your cash until you've taken your card out of the machine and a warning sound is given by the machine after a certain amount of time, NOT SO IN SOUTH AMERICA!!! In South America the process is different, and if you're the slightest bit preoccupied or absent minded then you'll get caught out. The process here goes like this, enter card - undertake transaction - receive money - get asked if you want to undertake another transaction of which you must answer Yes/No - then receive your card. In my head and under AUSTRALIAN rules once I had the enormous amount of 500 pesos in my hand I had subconsciously thought that my card was already in my wallet and I walked, obviously without receiving my card!!!!!
'PUTA MADRE!!!!!!!"
I checked out of the hostel and walked up Avenida 18 de Julio, some 3-4kms, with the aim of checking out the Estadio Centenario prior to jumping a bus for Colonia de Sacramento and then catching a ferry back to BA.
An hour or so later I made my way to tres cruces bus station, headed up to Colonia and made the ferry connection to BA. I was thankful to be back but something had changed. It was cold and it was raining in BA and the 430 Uruguayan pesos that I converted back to Argentinian pesos gave me just on 100 Argentinian pesos, which was not a lot. I also had the nasty feeling that the 100 peson would need to get me all the way to Monday, and that in turn would mean that my dream of making it to Iguazu Falls would have died a painful death somewhere on the Rio de Plata. It would also been the second occasion that my dreams of seeing the falls would be circumvented by some mischievous operation....
.......'puta madre'
23-24 August 2012
'Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to get to know a culture then spend a night in its bars'. II have a feeling that Mr Hemingway might have been clued in to a thing or two, even if his words were infused by fifteen or so daiquiri's from his old haunt of el Floridita, you've always got to follow the advice of the man! Along this same line of thought, I also believe that if you can tap into the food that makes a country unique or somehow find your way to those national culinary representatives, then it will be in that meal where you can get a sense of what makes a place and what it's about, for example, Brasil has their fejoida (a stew of black beans and salted pork, which is hearty and utilises cheap and easy to find ingredients), Argentina has its steak and Malbec (no gueses as to what their leading exports are), and Uruguay, well it has the chivito! That almighty, all hedonistic, all carnivore inspired sandwich that is meant to break the hearts and minds of even the most ardent of 'meativores', it is the iconic serve of the Uruguayans and a fabled treasure that I had attempted to hunt down on a previous turn through this hood but didn't quite meet the mark. Now it was time to go back!
Welcome to Uruguay - Chivitos on hand!
Like all good stories my visit to Montevideo on this occasion has a precedent which is none to ospectacular, indeed, this city and I have an inglorious history and my return was either going to allow Montevideo to do a little soul searching and make it up to me, or, it was going to spell out in no uncertain terms exactly what it thought of me after my premature exit a couple of years earlier.
Travelition! Ever heard of that? No neither had I until the Sydney Morning Herald invented a word for the rituals and superstitions that travelers adhere to when they leave the shores of terra australis. I have to say that I don't fall into the overly travelitious category. I mean my only real routine or ritual is that when I fly I wear a blazer because that's just the way I roll, but that's not a superstition. I do however like to follow my intuition and learn from prior experience, for example, my last escapade here, written up in this entry Montevideo - a city on standby, highlights the abysmal way in which the town treated me/us on the eve of its Columbus day festivities. Inuitively you would think that the black mark I'd mentally assigned Montevideo would have prevented me from taking the 3hr ferry ride from Buenos Aires to the Uruguayan capital, right? But alas, I'm stubborn, my search for the infamous chivito had not been satisfied, nor had my quest to make it to the Mercado del Puerto, a place that must be the beating heart of all things meat related in the universe! A place so meat centric that Anthony Bourdain was quoted as saying that '..this place made Argentina look like they're a bunch of vegetarians!'
Heading out of Buenos Aires, on my way to Montevideo - Uruguay
Somewhere on the Rio de la Plata - Argentina/Uruguay
What else was I meant to do? The meat, it was just....waiting for me, I had to go and see, you know!? I mean, it was going to all be ok, wasn't it? The city couldn't kick me in the teeth again now, could it?
I left Buenos Aires on a gloriously sunbathed morning, the sun rising over the docks, paving the way for a smooth, crystal clear run over the Rio de la Plata, the glass like conditions on that morning providing the perfect foil to any misgivings or apprehensions that I harboured for rolling the dice against my intuition.
I arrived in Montevideo 3hrs later, on an uncharacteristically warm Winters day, 24 degrees or so, the sun absolutely beaming down ...'Montevideo, you were already drawing me into your evil web of lies and deceit but I didn't know it, I didn't recognise the perverse trap that you had constructed for me, you evil, evil seductress'....Still, as I swiftly bypassed customs and exited the Buquebus terminal, walking out into the rarefied air of a Montevidean day I immediately saw the object of my desire, the Mercado del Puerto. Seriously, this place is a hedonistic concentrate of all things meat and wine related. It's as if all the greatest elements of Argentina have been reduced to just the one building and a food fair had been created for just one person, me!
Buquebus delivery in Montevideo - Uruguay
It was difficult to break the preposterous lure that this place already had on me. I'd been seduced within seconds of arrival by the overwhelming smells of charred meat, the sizzle and spit of beefy muscle as it hits the grills, the relentless seas of all things meat driven, but then, I also needed to drop the bag that I'd lugged across from Buenos Aires at my digs for the afternoon in order to save myself from the unnecessary hassle of having it tag along for what inevitably will be quite a debaucherous afternoon. So I headed up to the hostel, did the quick sign in and then split down to Ciudad Vieja, the old quarter of Montevideo, in order to take a few shots and heighten that inevitable rush that I was going to experience when I returned to the Mercado.
Montevideo - Uruguay
Montevideo - Uruguay
Ciuidad Vieja - Montevideo - Uruguay
Ciuidad Vieja - Montevideo - Uruguay
Now I can't say that Montevideo is a pretty city, and even though it fronts the Rio de la Plata (the river of silver), its foreshore can at best be said to be 'lacking a little in character', and at worst can be said to be plain ugly. In all honesty it probably hovers in between those two extremes. The old part of town itself, away from the foreshore, is gritty, has character and a bit of an edge, but also felt strangely deserted on the day that I walked through the area. There were parts that were degraded, crumbling, worn and beaten, bringing to my mind images that I'd seen of Havana and reminded me none to subtly of a place that had suddenly jumped to number 1 with a bullet on the Helisher - next in line travel destination.
Ciuidad Vieja - Montevideo - Uruguay
Rio de la Plata - Montevideo - Uruguay
Rio de la Plata - Montevideo - Uruguay
Rio de la Plata - Montevideo - Uruguay
Ciuidad Vieja - Montevideo - Uruguay
My time walking around Ciudad Vieja was only the prelude or starter to what would be the main course at the mercado, and when I did make it to the Mercado del Puerto, well, it was ALL ON kiddies!! For any person that remembers what it was like to go to the Royal Easter show as a child and be enticed by ever single show bag at ever ystall, well, this meat fest was exactly the carnivore equivalent. I was on a meat high as soon as I entered the building and that was just from the enticing smells that surrounded me,even better were the complimentary drinks being handed out by the vendors, enticing you to take up residence at their particular parilla and asado. So after having walked around for a while and acquired a nice buzz from the kindly vendors and their complimentary alcoholic beverages, I sidled up to a nondescript stall and commenced my afternoon stroll down the yellow brick road to Oz. The best meat, wine and cocktails all within arms length, what more needs to be said other than the fact that somewhere close to 4hrs slipped on by in what felt like an instant.
Entrance to the Mercado del Puerto - Montevideo - Uruguay
Meat fiesta time!!! Mercado del Puerto - Montevideo - Uruguay
Bring it!!!! Mercado del Puerto - Montevideo - Uruguay
A Chivito - not the meat extravaganza that I had anticipated, Mercado del Puerto - Montevideo - Uruguay
Somehow I managed to make my way back to the hostel for a late afternoon siesta. At that point in time I had every intention of heading out for the evening, that was at 5:30pm. The next thing I knew it was 8:00am the next morning - Montevideo you sly fox, you had trumped me and now you were going to bend me over for your own disturbing pleasure and self satisfaction.
24 August 2012
There are days when you somehow know that your subconscious has triggered the paranoia button and no matter how you try to dismiss what will become the inevitable, you know, you can just feel that the stylings of the day will not be controlled by you and that the full price to be paid is exactly the full value of apprehension that you're currently trying to mentally negate. This was to be this day, my second day in Montevideo! I mean the bad ass nature of the town crept up on me, without haste, inching itself forward and then with a quick crack of its whip it bit into my flesh leaving a deep and bloodied cut on my back. As I wrote in several postcards to my friends back home, 'Montevideo sucks balls, in fact, if there was a city named 'Sucks Balls' it would not suck as much as you suck, why? Because you SUCK BALLS!'.
As innocuous a sign as you could receive, the world of Montevideo spoke to me quite clearly that morning. I was having a little dulche de leche on some bread with a few cups of coffee when I decided to strike up a conversation with a fellow traveller. The guy introduced himself as Juan, he was from Buenos Aires, and in actual fact it just some happened that he would be travelling to Australia in the next few weeks, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to the telling of this story, it was just the run in to the 'hint' of a problem that I felt intuitively. In our conversation Juan asked me if I was going to be staying that night, I replied that I wasn't, that I was booked to leave back for BA that evening. He said to me that it was a shame as THIS night in Montevideo was their biggest party night of the year, it's called Noche de la nostalgia (Night of nostalgia), and EVERYONE gets out onto the streets for one mad Uruguayan fiesta....'Bro', he said, 'You just have to check it out'!
'Puta madre!!!!!!!'
Of course this was their biggest party night, last time I was here it was the eve of Columbus Day and now, on the eve of their biggest night of the year I was splitting back to BA. Juan and I chatted for a little while longer and then I headed out into the early morning for a litte post card reconnaissance, souvenir hunting and card writing.
...And then the rain! There it was again, and now the return of that that familiar sense of foreboding, that chill and sense of the inevitable, it was in the air. I negated a few drops of rain in search of a cheap paragua, acquired the 'best looking' post cards of Montevideo that I could find (which are pretty freakin' ordinary, let me just say), committed to memory that a correo (post office) was nearby and sat across the road from the Plaza Independencia to write my cards out.
Plaza Independencia on a dark, rainy day, thank you Montevideo, thank you for sucking balls that much!!
I'm sure that it was in that exact place, the very spot that I had chosen where all the rotten, downtrodden spirits that haunt this capital, collectively assembled and decided unanimously for this day that they would punish me so hard that I would mentally banish myself from this city forever, and to be fair, even though Montevideo had offered me a great time the day before the cards home were literally carrying the message that this place sucked balls, so perhaps I brought this strike of vengeance on myself.
'Puta madre!!!!!!!'
...And so the city attack commenced
I started with my search for a post office. The building that I had mentally committed to memory was no longer where I imagined it to be so I headed down to Ciudad Vieja to locate the other one that I remembered, of course it was closed....of course it was. At this moment both the rain and wind picked up buffeting my crappy paragua from pillar to post, I mean the only thing the umbrella was really doing was keep the rain off my hair.
So I walked, and walked, all the way up the main drag of Avenida 18 de Julio, looking for a post office. I walked and I asked people, many, many people. In the centre of this city there was noone that could accurately point me out to a post office and more oddly, seemed to be telling me that they weren't open on Fridays? Of course they weren't, this was going to be the day when everything died in Montevideo. I must have walked around for 3hrs looking for a post office, with a decrepit umbrella, my stubbornness transitioning into fury, the rain ever persistent and annoying. I finally had the bright spark that a hotel may be of assistance, and they were, 'Sorry, the post offices aren't operational on Friday!' ....'puta de madre'...they did however offer to send the post cards for me, a small win for which I thanked them.
After a brief bout of souvenir shopping I walked back down to the old town, aiming up for another afternoon at the mercado. I headed into a Santander bank and tried to get out a few pesos from their ATM's, but nothing, they weren't accepting my cards...of course not!!...I left and headed for the HSBC that I'd located the previous day but remembered after a few blocks that I'd also left my souvenirs on top of one of the ATM's back at the Santander bank. Like a lunatic I ran back to the bank and thankfully found the bag located exactly where I left it. Whilst I was there I also managed to acquire some pesos out of the only machine that was accepting my card. I took out 500 Uruguayan pesos (equivalet to $24.50 AUD) and headed off - now remember that figure in your head.
Walking the 6-7 blocks to the mercado I entered one of the shops with the intention of getting my old man a 1930 World Cup replica shirt. I took out my wallet, was just about to pay with my credit card and then I saw it, my card was no longer in my wallet!!!! My monetary lifeline to all things travel related had done a Copperfiedl! Where the f**k was it!!!??? My brain did a quick retrace and isolated the problem, I'd left it back at the Santandar bank!!!!
'PUTA MADRE!!!!!!!"
By this time I'd ditched that good for nothing paragua and raced the several blocks back to the bank hoping against all hope that my card would by some odd miracle still be there. Of course it wasn't, 'ahhhh fire truck!!!!', I kicked and cursed the dumb arse machine and must have looked like a raving lunatic to the two individuals that caught me mid spaz attack. I knocked on the 'closed doors' of the bank, it was Uruguayan lunch hour now (12-2) and they were closed, OF COURSE they were!!!, I asked one of the staff if anything had been handed in! It obviously hadn't, and they advised in turn that if my card had been sticking out then 'someone', more than likely 'anyone' would have racked it for their own personal use.
Now before you say 'how dumb are you to have left your card in an ATM!!!??' let me just give you the low down. At an ATM in Oz you put your card in, carry out the necessary transaction and your card is returned BEFORE you receive your cash! In fact you don't get your cash until you've taken your card out of the machine and a warning sound is given by the machine after a certain amount of time, NOT SO IN SOUTH AMERICA!!! In South America the process is different, and if you're the slightest bit preoccupied or absent minded then you'll get caught out. The process here goes like this, enter card - undertake transaction - receive money - get asked if you want to undertake another transaction of which you must answer Yes/No - then receive your card. In my head and under AUSTRALIAN rules once I had the enormous amount of 500 pesos in my hand I had subconsciously thought that my card was already in my wallet and I walked, obviously without receiving my card!!!!!
'PUTA MADRE!!!!!!!"
Now came that strangely familiar task of having to
calling home, having to organise a Western Union transfer, having to
cancel my cards and having to survive on my $24.50 AUD until I could
receive the funds. Aside from the sinking feeling I had from the card
loss there was also the realisation that as today was Friday trying to
receive a Western Union transfer in a Latin American country on Saturday
was going to be a near impossible task. Still, I tried to put that
thought aside and believed that Buenos Aires would at least treat me
with kindness, as for Montevideo, well it had struck the final blow and I
was ready to split now.
I checked out of the hostel and walked up Avenida 18 de Julio, some 3-4kms, with the aim of checking out the Estadio Centenario prior to jumping a bus for Colonia de Sacramento and then catching a ferry back to BA.
The Estadio Centenario, home of the very first World Cup in 1930 - Montevideo - Uruguay
Estadio Centenario - Montevideo - Uruguay
Estadio Centenario - Montevideo - Uruguay
Estadio Centenario - Montevideo - Uruguay
For those of you that don't know anything about football then let me tell you that Uruguay hosted the first world cup in 1930 and the final was played in the capital at the Centenario, so for me it was kind of a pilgrimage, and in my state the only thing that could uplift my beaten spirits. It was also the scene of my ONLY WIN for the day! I managed to get into the ground for free by finding an open gate and skillfully negated the 50 peso ($2.45 AUD) entrance fee!!! YEAH, TAKE THAT MONTEVIDEO!!!
An hour or so later I made my way to tres cruces bus station, headed up to Colonia and made the ferry connection to BA. I was thankful to be back but something had changed. It was cold and it was raining in BA and the 430 Uruguayan pesos that I converted back to Argentinian pesos gave me just on 100 Argentinian pesos, which was not a lot. I also had the nasty feeling that the 100 peson would need to get me all the way to Monday, and that in turn would mean that my dream of making it to Iguazu Falls would have died a painful death somewhere on the Rio de Plata. It would also been the second occasion that my dreams of seeing the falls would be circumvented by some mischievous operation....
.......'puta madre'
Back in Buenos Aires, cold, raining, just over100 pesos in my pocket - Welcome back Henry!
