A Mellow, Meaty Conclusion

Prologue: This post covers events that are over three years old. As usual…sorry. 

My previous post detailed the frustration I felt trying to do almost anything in Buenos Aires. As I waited to board my overnight bus to Uruguay, I thought I had finally left that behind. While boarding the bus, the driver checked my passport and told me I needed a stamp. I wasn’t sure what kind of stamp he meant, nor where to get it – I’d expected to deal with that at the Uruguayan border. But it was clear I wasn’t getting to the border until I had the stamp he was looking for.

So it was that my final moments in Buenos Aires found me at a full sprint, running back through security and the length of the bus terminal to a second floor of which I was previously unaware to get a stamp I didn’t know I needed from a ticket agent I didn’t know could give it. It was a fittingly frustrating, bewildering and stressful finish to a challenging portion of the trip. Buenos Aires had frustrated me one last time. Heart still pumping from the stress and the unexpected workout, I collapsed into my seat on the bus and prepared to wake up in Uruguay.  

My interest in Uruguay had grown gradually over the years, stirred at random intervals by various news items. There were occasional stories about President José Mujica, who donated a large portion of his salary to charity, continued to drive his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle throughout his presidency (2010-2015), and – my favourite part – condemned the necktie as a “useless rag.” Truly, a man after my own heart.

Uruguay also made the news for their progress on renewable energy, LGBTQ rights and their legalization of marijuana. I think I’ve always felt a fondness for small countries that pursue unique and progressive agendas (e.g. New Zealand, Iceland). I wouldn’t have flown across the equator just to see such a place, but once in the area, I wanted to make it happen.

As it has now been more than a toddler’s age since this trip actually happened – seriously, my youngest nephew was born after this trip and is now walking* – I will offer only my strongest memories of my time in Uruguay. There are a few:

Mellow Montevideo

In five days in Montevideo, I developed a bit of a fondness for it. After the sensory overload of Buenos Aires, Montevideo’s slower rhythms were a welcome change. The streets were lively and interesting, but no vendors tried to force their products on me. Indeed, unlike cities in both Chile and Argentina, Montevideo has organized an artisan market with regulated pricing and paid staff. It didn’t have the thrill of haggling with an artist on the street, but it was less stressful for all concerned and (I think) helps ensure fairer prices. The general feeling was very relaxed throughout my time in Uruguay, which was just what the doctor ordered in my case. 

You Can Take the Traveller Out of Urban Planning School…

…but you can’t keep me from noticing cool urban planning-related stuff when I travel. Here are three quick points:

- La Rambla, a 20-kilometre seawall and promenade along the Río de le Plata in Montevideo

La Rambla - note off-season weather

- Public art throughout Montevideo, and brightly-coloured building façades (if you choose to paint your house in a colour this bright, you have my support)

"How are we supposed to tell our houses apart?" "Oh wait, I know!"

Yes, that's Uruguayan football legend Luis Suarez. Yes, he has gigantic teeth.

- Punta Carretas, a former prison that has been converted into a shopping mall. I tend to avoid shopping malls, but this one was worth seeing as an incredible example of adaptive reuse.

The old prison gate now guards a shopping mall.

"¡El mejor carne de Uruguay!"

I spent my final two days in Uruguay in the town of Colonia del Sacramento, which is a quick ferry ride from Buenos Aires. Colonia is a relatively small, sleepy place, best known for its old quarter, which dates to the 17^th century. In the final days of my trip, it was a pleasant place to enjoy views of the water and wander the cobblestone streets. 

I did say it was a sleepy place.

In my wanderings in Colonia, I poked my head into a little restaurant that I liked the look of. It reminded me of a hunting lodge, or my great uncle Ted’s cabin in Muskoka: an open fireplace with a rifle hanging above, a wood pile for the evening's cooking and hunks of meat on prominent display. To paraphrase the 52^nd-best movie quote of all time, this place “had me at hello.”**

It was early by Uruguayan standards, so the place was empty, but the middle-aged woman behind the bar showed me a menu and I made my selection after trying to figure out which one was the steak (they all were). I took some photos with the proprietor’s permission.

When my order went in, a short middle-aged man with an impressive moustache (if memory serves) came out and began cooking. He looked as if my order had interrupted him in the process of chopping wood for that evening’s dinner rush and frankly, it might have. I surmised that he was married to the woman behind the bar, and that they ran the place themselves. Upon reaching the fireplace, he grabbed one of the gigantic hunks of dead cow, slapped it down on the cutting board and sliced off my dinner.

As I’d found throughout the trip, side dishes are deemed unnecessary next to steak, so when my meal came out it was as simple as you can imagine: a piece of meat grilled over a flame, presented on a wooden plate. As the chef placed it in front of me, he said, with great gusto, “¡El mejor carne de Uruguay!” (The best meat in Uruguay!)

The aforementioned best meat in Uruguay. Note: I ordered the fries separately, but I should not have.

He may have been right. I don’t know, I don’t usually eat beef. The memory of that steak’s taste has long faded. But the memory of that place, and that chef, has not.

The place started to fill up as I ate, and the chef – whose name I learned to be Mario – was busy on the grill. He seemed to know most of the customers, who just called their orders out as they sat down. One table of regulars realized how busy their host was and simply helped themselves from the (non-alcoholic) drinks fridge, telling Mario what they took. He or his wife noted them down and kept up a steady stream of banter from behind the bar. They took turns rearranging tables for new arrivals, saying hellos, and shaking hands. The two of them covered the roles of maître d’, server, cashier, chef, and presumably countless more that I didn’t see (dishwasher, for example).  

I could have watched this social ballet continue for hours, but I didn’t want to deprive others of it either. I left, and my table was quickly taken over by new arrivals. I returned to my hostel and relaxed with a book in one of the chairs near the main entrance, vaguely wishing I had waited until later to eat. In fact, the hostel staff were just phoning in their own dinner order as I returned. When it arrived 30 minutes later, it was none other than Mario himself – add “delivery boy” to his job title -  who had arrived on foot to deliver two freshly sliced and grilled servings of “¡El mejor carne de Uruguay!”

I don’t know why this anecdote sticks with me, and I won’t use space here to brainstorm an explanation. I’ll just say that Mario and his wife ran the kind of place I hope to find everywhere I go, whatever the purpose of my trip.

Playa de los Pocitos, Montevideo

Done!

It has taken me three years to write about a trip that took five weeks, but I did it! There is no more to write about my time in South America (I’ll spare you the story of the stomach bug I got on the way home, for which I DO NOT BLAME Mario). Watch this space for an update on the future of this blog…when I get around to it.

*When this trip happened, Barack Obama was President of the United States. Ouch.

**52^nd-best according to the American Film Institute, as listed here.

La Recalleta

Buenos Aires is probably one of the most widely-known South American cities, along with Rio de Janeiro. Although we encountered tourists throughout our trip, Buenos Aires was certainly the biggest tourist draw of all the places we visited. In fact, it was the biggest everything draw we visited.

I tend to think of myself as a pretty resilient person, particularly as a traveller. I’ve taken a long walk home at night through Paris, shared a two-bedroom apartment with 10 people for a few nights, rearranged itineraries due to missed connections, and hitchhiked on a deadline. I’m pretty adaptable. But it has been shown, on occasion, that cities challenge me. I grew up in a city (of 30,000 people). My parents live in a city (of 55,000 people). Sometimes they drive 90 minutes to go shopping in an even bigger city (of 160,000 people). And once in a while, they need to run down to a still bigger city (of 2 million people). But as my planning degree taught me, cities are now getting so big that they require new words to represent their size. Buenos Aires is a case in point (13 million people).

If I were to invent a new word to describe Buenos Aires, there's a chance it would be unpublishable. Looking back on it almost two years later, my strongest memory of Buenos Aires is of feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. The sheer quantity of people and buildings made for a constant barrage of external stimuli that drained both of us – though especially me, I think – of our fascination with our new surroundings. I can recall several times waiting for the city’s very affordable metro to arrive and hearing my travel companion say, “Nope. Not getting on that one,” when he saw how crowded it was.

Often crowded, always well-decorated.

Compounding this problem was the fact that no matter how well we thought we had prepared an outing, it inevitably proved to have more monkey wrenches in its works than we had realized. We would find museums with lines long enough to fill the place until well after it closed, bus routes with up to eight mapped variations that were not indicated on the vehicle as it arrived, and truly otherworldly traffic.

A picture is worth a thousand honks.

Perhaps the most representative example of our frustration was our visit to Le Recoleta cemetery, the final resting place of Evita Perón. Until arriving in Buenos Aires, Evita had been buried in the dusty attic of my memories of Latin American history courses (she may also be buried in your memories of the film Evita). I had learned about the cult of personality around her, but not fully appreciated it until I saw her likeness popping up around every corner in the Argentinian capital. Although she died over sixty years ago, she seems to be about as culturally present as Pope Francis – the first non-European Pope and a native of Buenos Aires.

So we made our way to La Recoleta and began looking for Evita. Bear in mind, North American readers, that this cemetery was not built like most of ours. Instead of simple headstones, most sites were filled to their proscribed limits with a single rectangular stone mausoleum, up to about ten feet (three metres or so) in height. The half-hearted maps and signage did not fully eliminate the challenges of navigating the narrow alleyways between these memorials. When we knew we were close to Evita’s site – a reasonably well-marked one, we assumed – we kept having to ask for directions. Someone would tell us it was two alleyways over. Another would tell us it was three more. Then another would tell us it was back two.

How often do you take a panorama of a cemetery?

I still have no idea where the memorial is because we never found it. Whenever we thought we had arrived, we hadn’t. By the time we found the next person to ask for directions, we were so far from where we’d been that we were basically starting from square one. Maybe she’s not even buried in La Recoleta, and they just say that to draw tourists. Maybe she moved when she found out we were looking for her (unlikely). Whatever the case, we were within throwing distance of perhaps the most famous resident of La Recoleta (a location that trades on her presence), a woman whose face still lights up the widest avenue in the world every night, and we never found her.

Evita still watches over Avenida 9 de Julio.

I realize, of course, that much of our frustration can be chalked up to our unfamiliarity with the culture. Although my Spanish had revived significantly by this point in the trip, it did not help us overcome local nuances in conversation. According to one source – a dual British-Argentinian citizen at our hostel – residents of Buenos Aires are noted for their habit of not answering questions directly. Instead, they might simply state a related, but not directly helpful fact. This claim might be spurious, as I have not been able to verify (or deny) it since, but it did help ease my fears that I was simply a bad Spanish speaker.*

However, I do not wish to sound as though I disliked Buenos Aires. It was a challenging place to adapt to as an outsider, but I realize that the challenge probably works the other way as well. In a philosophical sense, the monkey wrenches we found in our plans may have simply added to the mystique of the place; perhaps Buenos Aires is not meant for clinical execution of goals, but for serendipitous discoveries (we had a few of those too). As ever, it’s a question of perspective. Here are a few highlights:

- El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a former opera house that has been converted into a bookstore with a café built on the former stage.

- Patagonia Sur, a restaurant started by celebrity chef Francis Mallman. I was lucky enough to be treated to dinner here by someone who cares about me very much (and who was thousands of miles away). 

- La Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, a coastal nature reserve that was our respite from the city.

- El Museo del Humor, a window into Argentinian humor that we discovered coincidentally and that introduced me to Mafalda.

One of my favourites from el Museo del Humor.

Still, after a week of Buenos Aires, a dose of bed bugs (accompanied by a side of denial from our hosts) and a farewell to my travel companion, I was eager to continue on to Uruguay. Hopefully you are too.  

*I’d associate this nuance in porteño communication with others like the Canadian habit of apologizing pre-emptively and the Jewish habit of answering questions with other questions. Note also that Buenos Aires is where Lunfardo was invented - a dialect that intentionally mixes up syllables to confuse the uninitiated, somewhat like Cockney rhyming slang does with entire words. 

On the Other Side (of the Andes)

Once we’d completed the ordeal of crossing the Andes into Argentina, we set about actually exploring the city of Mendoza for a few days. It must be said that we knew relatively little about the place before we arrived; many of the things we noticed about Mendoza had as much to do with being in a new country as with being in Mendoza specifically.

One of the first things we noticed was the dramatic increase in prices. In Chile, we had been able to eat, drink and get around without much thought for our budgets; in Argentina, we quickly realized we were paying what we might pay back home. That led us to do a bit more cooking in hostel kitchens, and as it happened, our accommodation in Mendoza was quite nice and filled with friendly, chatty people. In fact, Mendoza itself was also slightly nicer, in many ways, than anywhere we’d been in Chile. There were fewer stray dogs and public spaces were generally cleaner and less cramped. I would hazard a guess that as Mendoza is primarily known for its wine, high-end tourism has played a role in creating those “nice” characteristics we noticed (and driving up the cost of living).

We managed to get our feet dusty, taking a city bus out to the edge of town for a day hike in the Andean foothills. It was a workout for us two East Coasters. We suffered the indignity of watching two local men in their 60s (or older), one using a cane, stroll past us as we took our umpteenth break of the ascent. We tossed potential excuses back and forth for the remainder of the climb, but youth was no substitute for experience, it seemed. The views were excellent, in any case.

The tourist with no name.

The two guys who passed us on the way up.

Two final points on Mendoza: because of some strange policies regarding sidewalk ownership and the irrigation system that was apparently built by the indigenous inhabitants of the area, sidewalks in Mendoza are almost comically unsafe. It appears individual property owners are responsible for maintenance – and some take pride in their cleanliness – but no one is responsible for making sure the sidewalk is flat or for building barriers along the irrigation ditches.

And finally, Mendoza has a tram system that we just had to try. Coincidentally, its terminus is in a suburb called – I did not make this up – Maipú. That is pronounced exactly as the most immature part of your brain thinks it is. When you’ve finished laughing about that, meet me at the next paragraph.

There's a tram in Maipú!

Given our memorably unpleasant experience on the bus over the Andes, we decided to splurge on our next journey to Buenos Aires. The range of bus services available in South America is remarkable, but perhaps even more noteworthy is how affordable they all are from a middle-class North American’s perspective. The trip from Mendoza to Buenos Aires is about 13 hours depending on stops; the prices for one-way fares ranged from about $75 to $150.

Our $150 fare bought us a trip that was as memorably positive as the previous one had been negative. In addition to seats that reclined to be completely flat, privacy curtains and a reasonably clean toilet, a trip attendant served us dinner, breakfast and champagne. She even spoke English, a non-essential but welcome surprise. As we arrived in Buenos Aires the following morning, we almost didn’t want to leave the bus.

At this rate, I'll probably write about Buenos Aires in another year, but...stay tuned!