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. And if the pasture didn’t have cattle, it had sheep. In New Mexico the sparse livestock nosing around desiccated clumps of gramma grass look out of place, like they’ve been left behind. Here the chivito bound beef appear as a natural part of the landscape, bovine, not bedraggled.
Then we crossed a bridge and entered Montevideo where two-thirds of Uruguay’s population of three-and-a-half million people live. Goodbye to the lowing pastoral herds, hello to narrow streets and constant traffic. And English? No one we encountered recognized the language. Communication was a bad mime show with hilarious attempts at Spanglish. Taking a cab to our AirBnB I’m surprised we didn’t end up in Brazil.
And our AirBnB on the eleventh floor of an old department store with a hotel tower that was built in the 1920s, well, at first I thought we missed something in the translation when it was booked. It looked fine, nice and roomy with furniture that didn’t leave me staring at my knees when I sat down, but…where were the towels? The password for the WiFi? The waste bins? Eventually everything was found, but without a host to welcome us it was like locating items in a scavenger hunt.
Outside on the street it was beginning to rain. Dodging pedestrians with our umbrellas in our search for a place to eat there were bodies to step over, cars running lights to avoid. It wasn’t pretty, but it engaged the mind. The dozy bus ride and its bovine pleasures were put to sleep.