Buenos Aires and Montevideo

Now that Mark and I have arrived home after our monthlong holiday, I have the time to sit in front of my laptop and blog about it. I will have to juggle blogging time with catching up on four weeks of “Coronation Street” episodes before the CBC website pulls them off-line.

We decided to explore the Argentine and Uruguayan capitals at length before our cruise. The cruise departs from Buenos Aires and has its first port of call in Montevideo, but we wanted to spend more than a single day in the Uruguayan capital, so arranged to go there for two nights on our own. We spent a total of three days in Buenos Aires before the cruise started, spent as two days before Montevideo and one day after.

As I had never visited Argentina before, I had my trepidations since I was not familiar with the Spanish language and was worried that the economy of hyperinflation would put me, as an identifiable tourist, at risk of being “unwelcomely approached” on the street. We did not obtain any Argentine pesos before we left on our trip because, based on Mark’s past experience here, the rate is more favorable if you exchange your money from a reputable agent while in the country.

Buenos Aires is serenaded by an urban rap where you hear Cambio Cambio Cambio on busy streets, most often on the pedestrian-only Florida. These hustlers can identify a tourist easily and they are all too willing to exchange your money. They stand so close to one another and I wonder how they can do business as surely they must see people walking past others who are chanting Cambio barely ten metres away from them. Based on Mark’s knowledge from his trip to Argentina two years ago, we exchanged our money at a place he knew about. I used American dollars to exchange for pesos and we were surprised to discover that the agents would have given us a better rate if we handed over larger denominations of bills, like $50 and $100. When I obtained my American money at my home bank I specifically asked for new bills, based on the advice I had learned from Mark and from on-line sources, but felt that the larger denominations would be more suspect of possibly being counterfeit than if I had handed over $20 bills.

In all my travels I have never had a problem with being at a loss for language. I do take pocket dictionaries with me to Finland and Switzerland, but rarely consult them. Most of the time I use them to find out about food ingredients and product labels. Since Finland is officially bilingual I can ofter decipher the non-Indo-European Finnish text by flipping the product around and reading the Germanic-based Swedish.

Yet on this trip I found myself consulting my small Spanish dictionary multiple times each day. I have often said that the only Spanish I can read is a menu, yet I am at a loss for everything else. Aside from learning to count to twenty on “Sesame Street” over five decades ago, I haven’t had a Spanish lesson in my entire life. So I was constantly pulling out my dictionary to read signs, labels, and to learn about specific ingredients in food items on menus. When we considered ordering a salad or a pizza, little did I know what zanahoria ( = carrot) or morrón ( = bell pepper) were. Some terms were obvious after I sounded them out, like desayuno which resembles the French déjeuner but means breakfast and not lunch. I heard in Argentine Spanish the -LL- pronounced differently from Castilian Spanish, as sometimes ʒ or ʃ. Thus when I ordered pollo ( = chicken) I said it as “posho”. Over the course of one month I picked up more Spanish–and four days of Brazilian Portuguese–than I had ever used in my life. Total immersion is the way to go when acquiring a language.

Silos Puerto Madero

Puente de la Mujer

The Obelisco at Plaza de la República

The Mural Evita on the side of the Ministério de Obras Publica

We saw these elevated police stations in Buenos Aires, including one in the middle of the road in a busy roundabout. None were occupied.

A sunny day at the San Telmo Market (Sunday, March 1)

On the roof of the Buenos Aires Museo overlooking Capilla San Roque

I enjoyed exploring the El Ateneo bookstores in Buenos Aires but regretfully we never made it to the El Ateneo Grand Splendid, known as one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world. I was amazed that the main store on the pedestrian-only street Florida devoted four shelves to books on the Falkland Islands:

They were, understandably, all in Spanish however two of the enormous books on the top shelf were diglots with English. The lowest and fifth row on this shelf was devoted to books on Argentine immigration. I saw books on Korean, German and Jewish migration. I did buy some books on the Falklands during my time in Stanley.

An ad for…Toronto chocolates by Savoy Nestle?

After two days in Buenos Aires we took the ferry to Montevideo. We had to check our luggage at the terminal and when we arrived in Uruguay 2½ hours later the bags came out on a carousel. My suitcase was there but not Mark’s. We waited and waited but no more bags came. Where was it? How could Mark’s bag have gotten lost on a ferry?

When we arrived at the ferry terminal in Buenos Aires earlier that morning we checked our bags at the same time. They were labelled and sent along a conveyor belt to our boat. Or so we hoped. When we docked in Montevideo, instead of exploring the city, we spent our first moments in Uruguay at the Buquebus ferry terminal office trying to track down Mark’s suitcase. The staff was sympathetic and helpful. They were cooperative and I didn’t get the idea that they were just saying they were working on it in order to get us out of their hair. After an investigation they reported that Mark’s suitcase had been misdirected onto a different ship, one headed for Colonia del Sacramento, also in Uruguay. We were told the bag would be delivered to our hotel later on that afternoon.

I liked their answer but wasn’t entirely confident that Mark’s bag would arrive as promised. We had three days and two nights in Montevideo and I hoped Mark’s suitcase would show up while we were here. If it hadn’t, I even went so far as to contemplate that since our first port of call on our cruise was in fact Montevideo, we might end up spending our second time here hunting down Mark’s bag.

When we returned to our hotel in the early evening and found out that Mark’s bag hadn’t been delivered, I suggested we walk back down to the terminal to see if it was waiting for us there. Mark was surprisingly cool about all this while I was worrying for the entire day, concerned that Mark might have lost everything. He would therefore have absolutely nothing with him in advance of our two-week cruise. I didn’t think however that Mark’s bag was stolen. Nor did we think that someone took Mark’s suitcase by mistake. When we left the baggage claim area there was in fact one black suitcase still going around the carousel, but it was smaller and of a different material than Mark’s bag. No one would have mistaken the two.

Fortunately the two staff members on duty that evening had our lost luggage claim on record and reported that Mark’s bag would be on its way to our hotel later this evening. They would send it over via an Uber driver. They were very apologetic, telling us that of the two thousand passengers on the ferry, it was horrible that one bag would go missing, and even worse that it was for a visitor to the country versus an Uruguayan. At least a citizen of the country would know the proper channels (and know Spanish) in order to track the suitcase down.

We decided to play Scrabble in our hotel lobby and Mark faced the front where he could keep an eye on the cars pulling up. Much to our relief, at 10:50 p.m. a car pulled up and a driver hauled a suitcase out of a trunk and wheeled it inside. I announced Mark’s name and the driver handed it over. Whew! Mark had lost his bag for thirteen hours. It had seen more of Uruguay than either of us, owing to its pit stop in Colonia. When we examined Mark’s luggage tag, it indeed was marked the same as mine, destination Montevideo. In spite of the electronic tagging system involving QR codes and barcodes, it still got misdirected.

Montevideo is a much smaller city than Buenos Aires and appeared less impressive. I noticed this immediately with the state of the sidewalks. Neither capital city used flat concrete slabs. Both cities employed what I called “Ritter chocolate bar” tiles to walk upon:

versus the edible kind:

Sidewalks were narrow and Mark and I could rarely walk abreast. Obstacles often stood in the path so anyone using a mobility device would have to venture into the road to get around. Walking in Montevideo at night was hazardous. I learned quickly to watch every step, as tiles were uneven and crumbled into bits and pieces. I never had an accident or stumbled while out walking because I was always looking a few steps ahead of me.

Outdoor observation deck at Mirador Panoramico de Montevideo

Inside the Presidencia building

Palacio Salvo

Flags of Venezuela, Kalaallit Nunaat and Palestine postered all over Montevideo

Montevideo street market

While walking around Montevideo we saw these trees, with bark that appeared to be peeling off in different layers. Each layer had a different colour, and the overall effect was a look of khaki, or “camouflage bark”.

We visited the Andes Crash Memorial. This is a museum dedicated to those who lost their lives, and those who survived the plane crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes in 1972. I had seen the movie Survive! and read the book about the crash, Alive by Piers Paul Read years before the Hollywood movie came out in 1993. The museum displayed actual artifacts from the crash site. It was riveting to stand in front of the little red running shoes, clothing, eyeglasses and notebooks the survivors kept. While in Montevideo I learned that a new book was published about the crash called Society of the Snow, a translation of the Spanish La sociedad de la nieve. The museum did not stock it in English, but I will look into getting it. Unfortunately taking photos in the museum was prohibited.

We went on three walking tours of the cities, two in each capital before the cruise and another in Buenos Aires after. I enjoyed the heat as we walked around in tank tops. With so much to carry (camera, lunch, water bottle, sunscreen, dictionary) I never wore a backpack because I didn’t want my back to be drenched with sweat. I carried everything in a bag instead. I have gotten some wicked sunburns in the past because of a failure to wear sunscreen yet I am happy to report that after four weeks in the southern hemisphere, where it is summer, I applied sunscreen liberally and often, and did not suffer any burns. On one day though I didn’t coat my neck, front or back, and it was red at the end of the day, but one application of aloe lotion soothed it and I was comfortable after.

Our Montevideo tour guide J. P. (in blue) liked his maté and conducted the tour holding both a maté cup and bombilla (straw) along with a thermos filled with hot water. He told us about the proper way to serve and drink maté and the importance of proper maté infusion and ingestion. In the movie Alive, J. P. said that the actors playing the rugby players got it all wrong. “They were stirring the yerba with their straws!”; he criticized this as a sacrilegious inaccuracy.

Our cards and chocolates for each other on Valentine’s Day morning. We took the cards onto the ship and displayed them on a narrow ledge in our cabin for the duration of the cruise.