Montevideo
City Streets
We chose a Heritage & Cultural Tour of Uruguay so we hop on our coach and head to the Montevideo Agricultural Market. This recently refurbished market offers a wide variety of products and services. It’s a market where all the locals come for weekly provisions. It’s clean, organized and offers everything from meats, vegetables, cheeses, prepared foods, batteries, gifts and the all-important Mata which you see many Uruguayans carrying. This is a tea made from leaves that you put into a gourd. You pack the leaves in and pour hot water over them. You have a special stainless steel straw (it has a strainer on the bottom) that you use to sip the tea slowly all day long. You also carry around a thermos which matches the gourd filled with hot water. As you sip the tea from the gourd, you continue to pour more water into it. Way too much work and you need another arm to carry around all the stuff. Oh but yes, we bought a gourd, straw and Mata. We stopped short of the thermos. By the way, in this market, the locals wait in orderly lines to pay for their goods with their Mata gourd in one hand and thermos in the crook of their other arm.
Again, this is a Sunday when most stores and museums are closed. However; the Carnival Museum is open so we stroll about its collection of costumes, drums, masks and multimedia related to the well-known festival.
We were treated to lunch at Facal, one of the oldest bars in the city. We were served the famous “chivito” – a sandwich of thinly sliced steak with mozzarella, tomatoes, bacon, lettuce, mayonnaise and olives. We washed it all down with Uruguayan wines. Dulce de leche is dessert which is soft vanilla ice cream covered in caramel sauce. OMGawd…No complaints here. Upon exiting the restaurant, we see a couple performing the tango on the street corner. They have a boom box with their music, a hat for donations and are classically dressed. The man shows up every day at noon and he has a number of female partners. Doesn’t matter how hot it is, they show up and they don’t sweat!
We spend the rest of the day wandering the city center and roaming the stores.
Day #2 – We cancelled our excursion for today and decided to walk among the locals. We were out before the stores opened so for a couple of hours, it was pretty quiet. There are many parks with benches and each park has a following of vendors selling their wares. There are cafes and restaurants up and down every alleyway. There is a Radisson Hotel right in the center of town which we made note of for a future visit. We walked by the Legislative Council, an impressive building made of national marble. It is considered to be one of the most attractive parliamentary buildings in the world. Not all countries have Embassy’s in Uruguay but we found one for the US, just in case.
Our walk also took us by the Artigas Mausoleum which is a monument to Uruguayan Jose Gervasio Artigas, located in Plaza Independencia. He is a national hero, who was also called “the father of Uruguayan nationhood”. It opened in 1977 and his remains are kept in an underground room underneath the statue. We climbed down the stairs to see walls filled with dates and writings of his good deeds. The monument is guarded by a traditional guard. After another few hours of walking, we called it a day and headed back to our ship.