Montevideo, Uruguay

We can't quite wrap our heads around this city. It's big, but seems small. After a day here, we realized that half the population has left for vacation somewhere else. It's like Italy in August. Everyone takes a holiday at the same time. If you live in a city with great beaches, where do you go for vacation? To other beach towns apparently.

We have a nice apartment 4 blocks from the largest beach, Pocitos. It's a mile long arc of a beach similar to Copacabana in Rio. But the comparison ends there. There are no beach restaurants or bars. The street on the beach is all high rise condos and we find it so odd that there are car dealerships and paint stores instead of restaurants and cafes.

We walked through the old town during the day on Sunday and it was post-apocolyptic. Streets were empty and trash was blowing everywhere around graffiti stained buildings. Lots of homeless people about. But if we did that 2 months later, I'm sure our experience would be different.

Uruguay makes their own wines and we're sampling them. For reds, the Tannat is king. The grape is originally from SW France near Toulouse and it seems to thrive here. It's great with steaks, which we're eating every other day. Why not? When in Rome. We haven't found a great white wine yet.

This is probably the spendiest country in Latin America with the best economy, but it's still much cheaper than the US. And to our surprise, there is an 18% refund on restaurant bills if you pay with a foreign credit card. So after a standard 10% tip, a steak meal for 2 with a bottle of wine is $50-$60 and an apartment near the beach is about $75. Steaks are so big, we split them and are still full.

So far, it's been beach time in the morning and then sightseeing in the afternoon. There are several museums. We stumbled onto a Gaucho museum at a former cathedral-like bank. Banco Republico is the largest bank here and they turned their old colossal bank building into a museum. The building itself is the museum because it looks like Grand Central station with marble everywhere.

Our Pocitos barrio is on the upscale and trendy side but with so many people gone and half the businesses closed, it just has a strange vibe. We feel totally safe though.

We went back downtown for museums on a Monday and it was livelier. The 1972 Museum was fascinating. It has artifacts and displays on the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team plane crash in the Andes that inspired the movie and book "Alive" and the recent retelling on Netflix's "Society of the Snow." It was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar last year. I highly recommend it.

The historic center is a strange hodgepodge of old and newer, ugly architecture. There are a lot of art Deco buildings that are quite beautiful, but for every one of those there's about 10 ugly or abandoned buildings covered in scribbled graffiti nearby. I haven't seen any graffiti that I would call art. The guidebook said the centro historico is used in films as a stand-in for old Havana, but I can't see it.

In general, there's just not a lot to do here for a tourist except beach time. We walked by the Montevideo selfie spot sign near the beach. There were busloads of tourists stopping to stand in line to take photos. Deanne read that that is one of the biggest tourist hot spots in the city. Oh man, I think I'm a spoiled traveler if that's someone's highlight. It's freezing back home so I'm not complaining! But, we are missing Buenos Aires with its huge leafy parks, it's range of restaurants, etc

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