Luck's turning around - thank you Uruguay!

After my 2 bad experiences in BA, I decided to escape town for a few days to recover. I tool a morning ferry (express, only 1 hour!) to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay  the boat itself made feel better because it looked like a cruise ship inside and since the tickets are $50 each way I knew i wasn't in danger of being robbed. At the terminal I made friends with a guy Justin who waa from Boston and recently moved here, so his Spanish helped tremendously. We spent a few hours wandering around Colonia. It's a tiny town but super cute  it's supposed to look like a Portugese town from the 1600s.

All cobblestone streets and old buildings. I learned that no matter how good your spanish is, there will always be something that will surprise you. When we went to lunch, one of the menu items was tortuga, which translates to turtle. Justin never heard of that being a Latin dish but it turns out tortuga is what uruguayans call a certain type of sandwich bread. We still refused to order it, just in case. In the afternoon we took a bus 3 hours to Montevideo, and just as i thought things were going smoothly, a rock came plummeting through my bus window, shattering glass all over the both of us. My first thought was that people were attacking the bus, but it was Actually some idiot, prob a teenager, who pelted a rock at the window to be stupid.
In any case, we got to Montevideo with just a few shards of glass remaining but everything else intact, to find out that the buses and taxis were on strike. A taxi driver had been killed on Saturday night by 3 guys and since the government wasn't doing anything about it, the transit system went on strike. This meant we had to walk the 45 minutes to the old city. Thank god I had Justin there, who was pissed because he had his entire bag with him (my bag was in buenos aires so I was traveling light). The city was safer, I made it in one piece, and was happy to be somewhere new. My friend Joel was also in Montevideo so we met up the next day and toured the whole city. There is a lot of old buildings by one side of the port and the rest of the city is surrounded by the beach. There was a Carnival museum that had some cool costumes and the history of Carnival but all in Spanish so I dont really know what they were saying.

We walked the perimeter, and even though it wasn't beach weather we walked on it and pretended we weren't so abysmally off season. We even found a movie theater that plays English movies! Unfortunately all that was playing en ingles was the Fast and the Furious part 4, so no movies for me quite yet. Hopefully Harry potter will be there in English come July.
Montevideo was an okay city, I can imagine in the summer it's a really cool beach town but I wasn't super impressed with it. The food was not nearly as good as Argentina with the exception of their chocolate and dulce de leche, but then again they pretty much just copy Argentina with that anyway. They did have one dessert there that I loved, it was a chocolate covered ice cream cone filled with dulce de leche. Amazing. Punta Ballenas was their famous brand, which I´m pretty sure translates to Dolphin Point, but as long as no animals were harmed in the making of this product, I´m happy!
I met another interesting person at my hostel. The man was probably about 60 years old. Originally from London, moved to Canada and was an aspiring actor. Wasn´t working for him in Canada, so he decided what better thing to do than to get on his bike and ride to South America.  He´s been traveling for 2 years, went down through the states through Mexico and down the west side of South America, all the way to Ushuaia. He said that to save on accomodations there were times he slept on the side of the road in Patagonia. I mean, I wouldn´t even do Torres del Paine down there because I thought it was too cold in a tent and sleeping bag. The longest he went sleeping outside was 12 days. Sometimes he asked firehouses or gauchos if he could pitch tent in their front yard. He paired up with this guy who used to be in the French military, who told him certain places in Patagonia were too dangerous to sleep because there were land mines all over. When Argentina and Chile fought over the land decades ago, they put land mines down to get the opposite side away. Now that the boundaries are all established, the land mines are still there and obviously can´t be dug up because they would explode. They send mules out into the fields to try to clear a path, and when a mule flies up in the air after setting one off, they know they found one. Crazy!! He said there were times he ran out of water, and the wind was too strong to light his gas stove to cook, but it was part of the experience. I wonder if I´ll ever feel able to let go of everything like that. The dude looked happier than anyone I´ve ever met. Maybe he lost his mind somewhere along Route 40. But it was amazing listening to his stories. I tried to encourage him to write a book, because he was also a fascinating story teller. Maybe that will be his new calling when he finishes riding home up the east side of SA.
I'm glad I went to Uruguay and got another stamp in my nearly full passport. I made it back to Buenos Aires in one piece, and even managed to walk the 30 minutes back to my hostel at night without getting robbed, killed, raped or sold on the black market.

I went back to my non-shady San Telmo hostel (dinnerless, since I managed to find about 2,000 calories worth of chocolate and dulce de leche at the bus station in Montevideo to tide me over) and went to sleep in my private room!  I woke up in the morning nice and refreshed, hopped in a cab to the US embassy, and got more pages added in my passport all within about 4 hours (and $82 later). Now I can travel for 26 more pages worth! Dont worry, it wont be all on this trip, promise!!!)

I now have another 3 days in Buenos Aires, and 2 of my friends Marlene and Alex come in tomorrow! I can´t wait to see them!!