Montevideo: South of Buenos Aires

Palacio Salvo

We just got back from a brief trip to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, where Jen did some training for a group of young American college graduates in Latin America working as teaching assistants. Montevideo lies directly across the Rio de La Plata from Buenos Aires and is actually slightly south of BA, a fact that might win you a bar bet someday. It's a three hour trip by boat, but on this occasion we took the thirty-minute flight on Uruguay's flagship carrier, Pluna. Leaving a chilly, but bright and sunny BA, we were greeted in Montevideo a half hour later by wet, stormy weather.

"What the hell?" I thought, realizing I had brought neither coat nor umbrella, and cursed the internet's predictions of steady sunshine. Driving along the coastal road into the city, it became clear that we had run into a pretty serious storm blowing in unexpectedly from Antarctica. "Southern winds" is how our driver put it. No kidding. The seafront, where the giant Rio de La Plata estuary meets the Atlantic Ocean, was being pounded by high tides and angry, choppy chocolate-brown waves. The wind was blowing a gale. Muy frio.

Punta Carretas Fruit Market

Our seaside hotel was nice, but not exactly central. We checked in around noon and had the rest of the day free, so we decided to take a city bus to the Ciudad Vieja (Old Town). Piling on all the clothes we could find, we ended up wandering around downtown Montevideo on a Sunday afternoon, which was strange because the place was completely deserted, as in ghost town deserted (I don't think the weather helped). We soon got back on the bus and headed back to the hotel. [Once the weather calmed down a bit on the second day, we got a proper tour of the city center and some of its interesting architecture.] Nothing to do at that point but relax and think about dinner.
We did some internet research and found that there was a highly regarded restaurant just around the corner called La Perdiz (The Grouse). As it turned out, there was nothing to grouse about. The food, sevice, and ambience were all excellent, and we ended up eating there three times, including the full group scarf-a-thon prior to departure on our last day. This mid-day repast featured beef carpaccio, fried cheese, chorizo sausage, fried ravioli, potatoes w/ mushroom sauce, fried fish, topped off with a giant steak! Wimpily, we declined the dessert.
Montevideo looks like a pretty cool place - miles of seaside with palm trees and beaches (kinda California-ish), with a center city that is reminiscent of (small-scale) Buenos Aires. We'll have to go back during the warmer months to get a proper feel for the place, I think. That wind, direct from the South Pole, was really freakin' nippy!