The lighthouse on the tip of the peninsula offers the best view of the town .It is one of the sights I came to see by joining a tour group at a local Montevideo hotel.
The lighthouse stairs are almost straight up and a two hundred and fifty pound man has trouble getting all the way to the top because of the narrowness of the spiraling passage. You keep winding up and up and up, holding to a thick piece of insulated wire threaded through eye bolts anchored in the lighthouse’s interior concrete walls.
At the first landing, you can get out onto a deck and walk around the perimeter of the lighthouse, but I keep moving to where stairs end and the dormant cyclops light sleeps this morning.
There is a 360 degree view of Colonia Del Sacramento with a different vista through each of the windows of the lighthouse.
There is a harbor on one side of the light. Fishing boats are moored there and a long wooden pier juts out into the waters of the Rio Plata river.
Another view from the lighthouse is the city of Colonia Del Sacramento This old city was founded in the late 1600’s by the Portuguese and they and the Spanish fought for several hundred years to see who would control the area and its waters. There is, according to Pat, a World War 2 German ship sunk in the harbor by a Captain who didn’t want to surrender his ship.
It must look like this from the crows nest on pirate ships where a half rum addled pirate with a knife in his belt scanned the seas for big fat merchant ships carrying gold. It had to have been a hard dangerous life to risk yourself for uncertain wages, a bottle of rum and a civilization that only had a curse and hangman’s noose for you when your feet touched dry land.
Our tour operators give us a few hours before we head back to Montevideo, so I go back down the stairway, much faster than I ascended.
This is a World Heritage city that lives up to its press.
There are still sun drenched places in this world untouched by terror and conflict, places where the past and present hold hands and dance into their future.
Colonia Del Sacramento is a place where the best of Europe and Latin America got married and are happy as a bride and groom cutting cake and sipping champagne.
When you travel it takes half a day to do what you do at home in thirty minutes.
At home you drive to Best Buy to get your electronics, order your stuff on line and it is shipped to you at half the price in a couple of days.
When you travel you go forth on buying missions and aren’t sure whether you are going to find what you need. You know that in a big city like Montevideo, where everyone is playing with gadgets, there must be shops selling accessories. You just don’t exactly know where they are and whether you can communicate what you need.
I take the old battery out of my language translator so they can give me the same thing new. My screen protector is still on my phone but its edges are frayed and it falls off every time the phone comes in or out of my right pants pocket.
This electronics shop is on Sarandi Street before Constitution Plaza. It doesn’t have huge window displays and you have to be buzzed in through the front doors by a guy working the counter. Inside, I show him my dead battery and he finds a replacement. He has the screen protector too.
Buzzed out of the store, I take a moment to get its location into my memory.
When in Uruguay, you do it the way Uruguayans do.
This store has a humble exterior but inside they had what I needed, when I needed it.
Finding stuff I need in a new place is gratifying, but it is the stuff I need that I can’t buy that causes me the most heartbreak.
On Sarandi Street are groups of people, dressed to the nines, standing in my way as I pass on a sidewalk past a woman’s fashion store,
Happy couples exit a bland doorway, into the sunlight. They are jubilant.
When more smiling couples come out and take photos, throw rice, hug and toss flowers to the next lucky man or woman, it is certain this extravaganza is about marriage, a traditional and good institution, if there ever was one.
A closer look at a little bland sign on the bland building confirms that this office, next to an upscale clothes retailer, is the City’s Office of Matrimony
As brides and grooms pose outside for their wedding pictures, some with professional photographers, others with friends or family who have phones or fancy cameras, some couples do dramatic hugs and kisses. Others are subdued.
On this occasion it would be a sacrilege to remark that not all of these newly joined couples will be together in five years.
The search to find someone who will live with you, for better and worse, is worth the effort no matter how it ends.
The next historical development in weddings will be to get married at a drive up window, in street clothes, with a cooler of beer in the trunk and passes to the opera in the glove compartment.
Most marriages begin happy but their success rate is still only fifty percent, regardless of who marries you, where you get married, how much money you have, what God you worship.
Odds, as Las Vegas knows, are hard to beat, but odds don’t stop people from getting married.
This grocery is a find – the Frog Maxishop. It is on the Peatonal Perez Castellano, a pedestrian walkway that connects the Montevideo port on one end and the Montevideo Rambla on the other. When cruise ships are in port, it is on this street that most cruisers shop.
Doing little cooking, it has become my custom to browse the neighborhood Frog for microwave meals and deli items. More discriminating diners eat steaks in the Mercado, or the Parrillada Bar and Restaurant where locals watch soccer games on a small flat screen TV, mounted on a wood shelf in a corner, near the ceiling, secured with a bungee cord.
This afternoon the Frog’s lunch special is Pollo a la Portuguese dishes that are pre-cooked and only need to be warmed before enjoying. The dish comes with rice and veggies and chicken, a nutritious meal.
It is busy in the grocery this morning and many in the neighborhood walk here to shop. Turistas, as well as locals, browse the aisles, price checking and reading labels.
I take a couple of the dishes home with a six pack of bottled water.
Shopping beats cooking, any day, and finding what I need, this easy, is a major coup.
Shopping local makes the city start to feel like a home away from home.
Walking the streets of the port district, you find hotels you might have stayed if you hadn’t rented a studio. It is human to comparison shop, wonder what that place or this place has to offer at what price.
The two hotels within a block and a half of my studio are the Don Botique Hotel and the AK Design hotel.
According to TripAdvisor, both establishments are clean, safe, well rated, offer free internet. The Don offers a regular breakfast while the AK has a Continental breakfast. Both places get good marks and both hotels have websites with visitor reviews. For the time I have been here, moving into high season, the price for a room for one adult for one night at the Don is $168.00 U.S. A night at the AK is $70.00 U.S. My studio is less than $30.00 U.S. per night.
When I throw open shutters and walk out onto my little balcony, I can see the Don.
For price,privacy, quiet, and flexibility, I like the view better from where I am standing.
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