A delightful weekend in a country (draft)

So...
Uruguay...

What can I say, I´m in love.
Perhaps Colonia was either a little slow or a little too like home for me but Montevideo. Oh, Montevideo. But the food was good in Colonia and the scenery pretty. The Argentinians on holiday were fun, and the hostel settled for a single cockroach scampering in the court yard as I listened to tales from an irish guy about a friend in columbia who once spent two hours in the capital and managed to be robbed of everything but the pair of boxers he had under his clothes and had to walk to the embassy teetering on the brink of naked.
However I digress. The capital.
There is something altogether charming about a capital city that closes down for a football match. And a major city in which, when you stand in the very center, you can still see both coasts with a degree of clarity. The architecture is amazing. 16th century spain with glossy and glass highrise and tumble down victoriana created the strange and old place.
Whilst the theatres and the galleries and the plazas which draw we shameless tourist folk are nice it´s shedding the tourist mantle which makes the city worthwhile... much like any really, but here it is more rewarding.
So we took a wrong turn. Bad neighbourhood. We were oblivious to this until the fire started round the corner and the barman told us to watch our bags though. But maybe the nieghbourhood made it. The waiter stood talking in that peculiar mix of Spanish and English I´m getting worryingly used to for half an hour. Told us who to cheer for. Introduced us to his friends. To aband. To an English guy who stepped straight out of a Graham Greene novel. Specifically I´d say Our Man in Havana. He insisted I tried the whisky and told us of his year in the army, his years as a traveling salesman in Iraq, all in a wonderfully upper class tone flavoured with the drink and the forces. He claimed, and I´d believe him based only on the quality of the whisky he was drinking, that the bridges before the gulf war were his. And the bridges after the gulf war. But not a bridge of his still stands in Baghdad.
But the evening wore on and after a tale or two of his adventures in South America he set off, a little shakey but still amusingly colonial, with warnings of the night and an insistance on picking up the tab.
As luck would have it for two ladies travelling South America sin amigas however, we landed during the taxi strike. A driver had been killed. So we were forced to stay for more cerveza and a game of whisky flavoured chess which saw me loose painfully to the owner after I accidnetally mentioned, yeah I know the rules.For this favour we got our taxi, a friend of a friend of a waiter or a brother of a friend of a friend of the waiter, or a cousin of the friend of an ex wife of an ex waiter. I was lost in technicality.
The clubs of Uruguay, conveniantly all of them seemed to be under or next to our hotel were hilarious. We settled for one called the Prancing Pony, with a lord of the rings theme and free Psychobilly. Not too shabby but thoroughly odd. The fellowship played all night and the staff all wear a gold ring on a chain. After the band the music was filth but barely noticable. I´d found more whisky by now :s
I wish I could tell you more reasons I´m so hopelessly infatuated with Montevideo but for now I don´t recall much.
The evenings dragging on back in Buenos Aires and I´m vaguely aware of a need for sleep. I can assure you our hotel/hostel in Montevideo was literary though. Most of Evelyn Waugh´s noevls could have a scene or two filmed on it´s peculiar colonial balconies or on it´s rotten grand furnishings.
That´s enough for now.
I have a tale of Palermo for tomorrow.
Happy inauguration day.
Buenos Noches.
Ranna
x