Post by Grubb Yesterday we went down the block from where we’re staying and visited the Evita Perón museum. Evita was an Argentine socialist Princess Diana, a fashion model for the welfare state. When she died in 1952 at the age of 33, it was a shock to the nation. The spectacle of her funeral…
Author: Grubb
Bread and water
Post by Grubb with additions by Ella So far on this trip I’ve eaten more meat than the nineteenth century mountain men I’ve read about, but two nights ago we entered a zone of carnivorous excess that was the height of Roman Empire decadence. If it had a hoof, we ate it. Each entry in…
Midnight mosquito crew?
Post by Grubb Last night I was sitting out on our AirBnB porch recovering from our meat lovers feast, when I heard a large truck grinding its way up the street. It had the bulky solidity of a garbage-hauling beast. Every thirty feet it came to a stop. I thought for garbage collection it’s not…
Palermo Soho
Post by Grubb Our last few days in Buenos Aires will be spent in the Palermo district. Similar to the upper east side in Manhattan, it’s more upscale than the Recoleta district that we stayed in four weeks ago. Venturing out on our first exploration of the neighborhood it seemed we passed restaurants and cafes…
Contrasting beliefs
Post by Grubb. On our way to Punta del Este yesterday, we visited a point where the Rio de la Plata merged into the Atlantic. Poking up into the skyline were a meteorological tower and a church. I thought they made a nice balance.
Dodging selfies
Post by Grubb There’s a large sculpture off the beach at Punta del Este of four fingers upthrust from the ground. It’s by a Chilean artist, Mario Irarrázabal, who says he is enthralled by the forces of nature. I wanted to capture a quick shot of the fingers as we were returning to our ride,…
Adios, sol
Post by Grubb The final stop on our Sunday trek was Casapueblo down the road from Punta del Este. This jerrybuilt meringue of a house decorates the cliffs that fall from a small jut of land that pokes into the Atlantic. It began being constructed in the late 1950s by Carlos Páez Vilaró and was…
The big urn
Post by Grubb. Today (Saturday) our walking tour of historic Montevideo took us to the underground mausoleum in Plaza Independencia where the large urn holding José Gervasio Artigas ashes are guarded by two soldiers. Artigas is the Uruguayan George Washington. He assembled the states that formed Uruguay and declared independence from Spain. As far as…
Little people poking through
Post by Grubb. Yesterday the second place we stopped during our rainy day Montevideo museum ramble was the Museo des Visual Artes. From the outside it looked like a modernist mid-school painted in bright primary colors with a modest sculpture garden. Inside, it had a large collection of Uruguayan painters whose main purpose was to…
Flight 571
Post by Grubb. It’s fitting that that the first museum we visited in Montevideo on Friday, after having on Tuesday been in the Andes, was the one devoted to the 1972 plane crash of a Uruguayan flight that, leaving Mendoza en route to Santiago, failed to make it over the mountain range. The accident took…
Bus to the big city
Post by Grubb After enduring the economy class plane cramps of flying around Argentina I had been looking forward to any other type of transportation, and the bus ride out of Colonia was, like the ferry excursion from Buenos Aires, very comfortable. Rural Uruguay, swept by. Every lush green pasture seemed to have cattle grazing….
My kind of Michelin restaurant
Post by Grubb This was on the window of a café in Colonia.
Future doctors? Pharmacists
Post by Grubb Passing a schoolyard in Colonia it was interesting to see that the kids were dressed like extras on the set of Grey’s Anatomy. Wardrobe as destiny? Does a dirty lab coat get you a bad grade? What about that poor boy sulking in the corner who wants to be a fisherman when…
Game of empires
Post by Grubb Colonia is on the Rio de la Plata an hour’s ferry ride from Buenos Aires. Standing on one of the jetties fingering off the coast of Colonia, I felt like I was gazing at the Atlantic Ocean, but it was only the wide mouth of the Rio de la Plata which served…
Out of the blue into the brown
Post by Grubb. Talking to an American woman we ran into at the airport in El Calafate we found out that, coming back from the Iguazu Falls, she had spent a few days in Montevideo. How was it? She grimaced, “The water was brown!” So yesterday, after flying in from Mendoza, we took a ferry…