Carmelo, Uruguay

Went to Carmelo, Uruguay for the whole day on Sunday. I have to leave the country every few months, because I’m not a legal resident of Argentina. I just have to cross the border and then come back again. I usually just go across the river to Uruguay for a day. This time I went alone, and it was my first time visiting Carmelo. I like traveling by myself every now and then. I just walked around all day and sat around under trees, reading and drawing pictures.

Carmelo is a quiet, small-time tourist town on the wide brown Río de la Plata. It has a sandy river beach and a few hotels. I imagine it gets a little busy with Argentine and Uruguayan tourists in the hottest months of the summer, but it’s early spring now, everything was pretty empty. One one side is the town, lots of cobblestone streets and typical one-story houses, lots of great art deco architectural details and great old signage. There are a handful of old hotels and nice old theatre buildings.

There’s a central plaza with a church and a few businesses, two restaurants and the deserted Club Uruguay. Across the bridge, there’s more grass and trees, horses and goats grazing in peoples’ yards, a few boat clubs and if you walk about 20 minutes you get to the beach, it’s in a big park with campsites and a few desolate-looking beachside restaurant type places. Everyone here seems to be riding a little motor scooter, I think if I came back again I would totally look into renting a scooter too.

I left home before dawn to catch a train out to Tigre, and then in Tigre I caught a ferry, it’s a three-hour ride out through the delta and across the river to Carmelo. Stayed there all day and then caught the 8:00 ferry home, got into Tigre around 10:45 and then finally got home around midnight. Long day. But a nice one.

can’t keep up!

Lots of exciting and awesome things have happened in the past few weeks/months, and all of these exciting things have been keeping me very very busy. Too busy to blog! I’d like to go back and write a more detailed entry about each of these things, but for now here’s a quick list:
-October: weekend at the beach in Uruguay with Julia and friends.
-November: taking Level 5 spanish course at the University of Buenos Aires aka La UBA
-November: got the worst flu
-November: Amy Sawyer came to visit, yaaayyy!!
-November: 8-day trip to Salta and Tucuman provinces in the north of Argentina
-November: nice mention of Morris & Essex on Design*Sponge, which brought me tons of card orders and wholesale inquiries! i’ve been working like a sleep-deprived madwoman to fill wholesale orders and keep up with it all. I am my own sweatshop.
-December: adopted a new puppy! we wanted a friend for Emmylou Elbows, who seemed terribly sad and lonely and scared all the time. new puppy is adorable and fearless and nameless. we’re thinking of calling her Inga Josefina.

uruguay beach weekend

ok, i’m trying to catch up on some good stuff that I’ve neglected to write about in the past few months… In October we took a nice chill weekend at the beach. Mike had a day off from work for “Virgin Day” or something like that. Argentina has so many national holidays. Julia invited us to come to Uruguay with her; we took a ferry across the river to Uruguay, arrived in Colonia and got right on a bus to Montevideo. I’d been napping on the ferry and was still totally groggy when we walked out into the terminal; I immediately crashed straight into a giant pole (it was painted white and everything in the room was white, i didn’t see it!) it hurt so bad and it scared the bejeezus out of me, i was so groggy and confused I spontaneously burst into tears and then i felt very embarrassed about a) being clumsy/oblivious and b) crying like a baby, but luckily nobody seemed to notice, or at least nobody pointed and laughed at me. We got into Montevideo around 10 or 11 pm and met up with Julia’s friends Eugenia and Antonella. We ate some dinner in Montevideo and then took another bus, headed north up the coast, around 1 am! An hour or two later we asked the bus driver to drop us on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere around 2 or 3 am. It was beautifully cool and quiet and deserted and dark. We walked about twenty minutes, through a tiny seaside town, to get to the rental house next to the ocean. Dropped off our backpacks and walked on out to the moonlit beach!
The town is called La Tuna, somewhere between Montevideo and Punta del Este, where the brown Rio Plata water mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean.

……..So we spent a few days chilling and doing nothing, walking on the beach and reading and drawing. The beach was really quiet, just a few fishermen and occasional families playing in the sand. I jumped in the water once and it was super chilly! I guess Uruguay in October is about like Maine in June…
Antonella staged a video shoot on the beach, lots of her friends came out for the afternoon and they acted out some kind of live-action Super Mario video art with lots of jumping in the sand dunes. Then we had a typical giant asado, lots of beef and sausages, crusty bread and fresh salad. They had these delicious sweet blood sausages that tasted like fruit and cinnamon! Usually blood sausages are too creepy for me to eat (they’re called morcilla here) but these ones were just so tasty, I couldn’t get enough. We made lemon squares for dessert.
After a big thunderstorm the sun peeked out through the clouds and there was this amazing light on the wet deserted beach.
Muchissimas gracias a Antonella, Eugenia y Julia para invitarnos!

Montevideo

was fun! We thought we might not be able to go, because of all the smoke. On Friday the smoke was so thick in Buenos Aires that there was no visibility at all and the port had to close down. All the highways were closed and the bus station closed too, so I was feeling really trapped! But at the last moment the smoke lifted a bit, they opened the port, and we caught our ferry over to Montevideo. We had an hour-long ferry ride to get across the river and then a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride to get to Montevideo.

People say that Montevideo is boring and quiet, and it was kinda true, but I liked it. In general I think the vibe of the city is much more relaxed and quiet than Buenos Aires, and at night (or on Sunday morning) it can be pretty spooky, like a ghost-town. The architecture is pretty similar to Buenos Aires, which I love. On Saturday morning we went to the Old City and there were some lively bustling touristy areas. There was a fun antiques-market in Plaza Matriz. We bought some old lino-prints from the seventies to add to our growing collection of cheap art. The Ciudad Viejo in Montevideo seemed a lot like the San Telmo neighborhood in Buenos Aires; that is, lots of beautiful old buildings and cobbled streets, and some intense touristy spots and other areas that are just quiet and old. When we returned to the Ciudad Viejo in the evening, we wandered off the main drag looking for a restaurant, and suddenly all the streets were SO dark and absolutely silent and deserted, it was totally spooky and we hurried back to the main plaza.

We rented bikes for the whole day on Saturday and rode all around town. That was my favorite thing about Montevideo. It cost about US$10 to get two bikes for eight hours, and the traffic in Montevideo is totally chill. There is a bike/walk path beside La Rambla, the road that follows the seashore all around the city, past piers and parks and fishing clubs. It was beautiful riding all along the shore and looking out to sea, going past people fishing off the piers or sitting on the wall drinking mate. We also rode around the streets, which are beautiful and quiet. The cars drive in single-file (unlike in Buenos Aires) and nobody ever tries to run you over. The city is a bit hilly, but not too much.

We stayed at Red Hostel Montevideo, which was really beautiful but terribly disorganized. It’s a gorgeous big old stone building that’s been nicely renovated, with a cute little woodstove in the middle and a gorgeous stained-glass skylight, and a nice terraza with a bar on the roof. Our first night there, they had screwed up our reservation and had given away the room we’d reserved, so they put us in a terrible little room with awful beds, but the second day we got to move to the room we’d reserved. Then they kept asking us to pay for our room, even after we’d already paid. So, I recommend the place because it’s so beautiful but they were as disorganized as any hostel.

The food in Uruguay seems to be mostly the same as Argentine food, but they do have this special combination, Chivito, that’s served at all the restaurants:

It’s a big steak with ham, cheese, bacon, and a fried egg on top; sitting atop a mound of french fries, melted cheese, potato salad, lettuce, tomato, carrots, beets and green beans.

Montevideo here we come!

We’re still here on tourist visas, which means we have to renew them every three months. We braved the bureaucratic maze of the Migraciones office in Buenos Aires to get ours renewed three months ago, but you can’t do that twice in a row, so this time we really have to leave the country and come back in again! Usually we go across the river to Colonia, Uruguay for a day, which is lots of fun but after the fifth trip, it’s getting a tiny bit boring. So we decided to go a bit further and spend the weekend in Montevideo, Uruguay! You take the same ferry across to Colonia, and then get on a bus up to Montevideo. We’re expecting a chill, laid-back weekend of strolling, sitting in cafes playing cards, exploring and walking on the beach! In truth, most people in Buenos Aires really have nothing good to say about Montevideo, like “if you want to be in a city, stay in Buenos Aires! why bother going to Montevideo, it’s small and boring!” but I’m sure it will be fun just to get out of town and see a new place. Also, I love beach cities so I think I’m going to enjoy it. Of course, I’ll post pictures and stories when we get home!

Uruguay

Colonia, Uruguay
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

On Saturday we took a boat to Uruguay. The day-trip across the river renews our tourist visas for another three months! I didn’t realize we should have reserved our tickets at least a week ahead of time; lucky we managed to get some last-minute reservations on Buquebus, which runs the main ferry to Colonia de Sacramento, a sweet little historic tourist town on the opposite bank of the Rio Plata. It was a very crazy scene at the ferry terminal because this is the height of summer and everyone wants to go away for the weekend! We took a one-hour express catamaran. It was very comfortable and futuristic. At the ferry terminal in Colonia people boarded buses to go on to Montevideo or other spots in Uruguay. We wandered into town and found it amazingly quiet and peaceful. The old town of Colonia was built during Portuguese colonial rule and it is a UNESCO world heritage site which means I guess that it’s lovingly preserved in its historic state. The town is surrounded on three sides by water, so if you walk to the end of any cobblestone street you can look out over the river. The Rio Plata is huge (you can’t see the far banks), it looks like the ocean except it’s milky brown because of iron in the land upstream. Stairs lead down from the cobblestone streets to the grassy and rocky riverbank and people were sitting under the fruit trees or climbing over the rocks to swim. It looked great so we jumped in to cool off. Later we went into an amazing old white church with a weird basement, climbed a lighthouse and looked over the town, had lunch in an expensive touristy cafe where everyone was speaking English and the menu had prices listed in pesos and US$, and then rented a motorbike. We rode out to the Rambla Costanera, a road that follows the waterside along a string of beaches. The beaches are piney and pebbly but the water is warm and shallow and the bottom is super soft and sandy. Everyone on the beach was speaking Spanish, and those who weren’t swimming were barbequeing or lounging under the trees, drinking hot mate(!) on a very hot afternoon. Past the beaches is Real San Carlos and the remains of a 1900′s leisure resort area which was barely used before it was abandoned. I wish we got to explore Real San Carlos more, but we were getting all sunburnt and exhausted and we moto’d back to town and got ourselves some homemade alfajores and a few bottles of Grappa de Miel, an honey wine that’s an Uruguayan specialty. We got on the ferry at sunset. We rode home on the “barco lento,” a bigger older slower boat that takes three hours to cross the river and has the size and feeling of a 1980′s shopping mall. We skipped the video arcade and shopping area but had some icky packaged sandwiches in the food court, had some fruity cocktails on the roof and then curled up fell asleep under the stars, lying on the hard upper deck along with a sea of other tired travelers. It was a totally awesome day except for our arrival in Buenos Aires. We were delayed in the dock for an extra hour(!) while the boat rocked sickeningly and everyone went slowly crazy wondering why we couldn’t get off the boat. Later we heard that the delay was probably caused by protests against a paper mill being built upriver. But still a great day and I recommend it. Colonia is pretty touristy but makes up for it by being unbelievably cute and tranquil and heavenly.