Montevideo

We´ve been here 4 days now and I´m starting to feel a little bit settled. We´re taking lessons in español in the home of a Montevidean woman who gave Spanish lessons at the U.S. embassy here for 40 years -- she speaks of some of her former students as "my Marines".

Profesora Eddy is a wonderful source of information about the history and culture of the country as well as being a good language teacher. She is also our landlady which got a little sticky at first when it appeared our rent might suddenly become double what we were told in email. Fortunately, diplomacy and the fact that we had no refrigerator prevailed. We now have a Coleman cooler in which to keep our plastic bags of leche commun.

At the risk of sounding like a Christmas letter, here is the daily recap.

Wednesday:

Our travel down here took about 24 hours, stopping in San Salvador and Lima. Free internet in San Salvador (still can´t get over it) and delicious Peruvian beef & noodle soup in the Lima airport (looking forward to more later in the trip.) We arrived exhausted at 5AM & took a cab from the aeropuerto. So kindly, Eddy was waiting to let us into the apartment and then left us to sleep for about 10 hours. That afternoon we took a walk down to the seafront in our neighborhood, Pocitos, where there is a Plaza Winston Churchill next to a Point Charles de Gaulle. We went over to Eddy's (she lives around the corner from our apartment) where she gave us a tour of the house and some steak asado. She & her husband have an indoor barbecue in a building out back. Then she took us on a tour of the neighborhood for our first lesson -- the corner store, bakery, local Planetarium, your typical necessary services.

Thursday:

Before class we discovered that our shower is hot but pretty much just a trickle. We also found that the reported omnipresence of cafés in Montevideo does not apply to our neighborhood. The nice people at the corner panaderia made us some very sweet instant coffee, not something they typically provide, and we just made it to Eddy´s by 9am. Our lessons are a good combination of paper exercises and conversation, including some illuminating discourse on the jaundiced view our teacher takes of her country´s current government.

That afternoon we took a long walk down Avenida Rivera (the street we live on) to Avenida 18 de Julio (the main artery of downtown) and into downtown. A lot of buses and grafittoed buildings, and a lot of dogs. We stopped in at the Biblioteca Nacional where there is still an in-demand card catalog and walked down past the patinaed monument to The Gaucho. We had a late lunch of onion pizza in a little cafe off Plaza Cagancha and then took the long walk home to do our homework.

This is sounding very Christmas letter-y. Maybe I´ll do our next days in a second post.