From the outside a year seems like so much time. And it is a lot of time. 12 months. 52 weeks. 365 days. 8765 hours.
It’s long enough to conceive and have a baby. Long enough to buy land and build a house. Long enough to go into remission from a disease. Long enough start a new career, like becoming a realtor. Long enough to plan and leave for a sabbatical. Long enough to learn a lot of language. Long enough to get inches taller. Long enough to forget most everything about home (if you’re three).
But when you’re on the inside of those months and weeks and days and hours, a year can feel like no time at all.
It took five months to get temporary residency organized. Longer to get pay checks fully worked out. It was nearly six months before I could hang laundry outside our tenth story windows in a strong breeze without feeling like I should follow it up with a stiff drink. Almost nine months passed before the portero casually mentioned that “everyone” knows the water from the garden spigot is the best for drinking. It was ten months before the kids settled into close friends and frequent play dates. At eleven months I found a friend for coffee dates. There are days when, after almost twelve months, it feels like life here is just finding a groove. That we’re just really getting started.
Then there are days when a year feels endless and home is the only place we want to be.
Either way, here we are almost at the very end. Back to the beginning of the calendar, but nowhere near where we started.
As quickly as people here asked, “Why come to Uruguay?” when we first arrived, they now ask, “You’re leaving so soon?”
We will miss being surrounded by Spanish. We’ll miss pastafrola, ice cream, fainá, and pizza. We’ll miss roaring buses that take us almost exactly where we need to go. We’ll miss the Rambla and the wide expanse of blue sky and brown water beyond. We’ll miss the store downstairs where, when we’re running late , he lets us take what we need and pay later. We’ll miss the almost daily find of some new knowledge (that soda moves east in the summer, that alcohol sales are prohibited on election day, that it is illegal for restaurants to have salt shakers on tables, that children’s vitamins just don’t sell here).
The kids will most certainly miss the porteros who chase them, tease them, bring them gifts, and never ever let them feel ignored. They’ll miss their schools where every single person knows their names. And where kids now stop Nathan and I to look up at us with the most forlorn expressions and ask, “Why do you have to leave?” I will miss walking past the boy’s school and catching a glimpse of him yelling and running after some giant six grader, his voice lost in the cacophony of kids at play.
I will miss kissing on the cheek as a way of greeting; that brief, intimate contact that humanizes even a passing exchange. I will miss this even though it often means waiting forever to be served because the person helping you must first kiss every single coworker and acquaintance they pass between them and you.
There are things we certainly won’t miss: dog feces, neighbors fornicating at 4am, the involved process of paying bills, and the sour smelling mold that blooms in our walls.
I think we’d all agree that we’ve enjoyed Uruguay a great deal. In some sense we wouldn’t mind the chance to stay longer, but it’s time to go and so we’re ready.
We’re ready in large part because over there, on the other side of the world, is home and friends and family and community, which I admit I never stopped missing. Not missing it in the choking way that makes it impossible to enjoy the here and now, but in a way that is comforting and reassuring. And here’s where I get stuck in translating emotions into words. Phoebe is far better at expressing thoughts on friendship and distance.
Look, maybe it’s as simple as this: The experience we’ve had here this past year has been made richer and warmer by the support, friendship, and foundation we have there; and for that we are profoundly lucky.
The thing about being vegetarian in a carnivorous country is that you rarely go hungry. People are so concerned about making sure you get enough to eat, and concerned that the foods you eat seem entirely unsatisfying to them, that they keep offering more food until the table (and your waistband) are groaning.
This was definitely the case for us last weekend when we headed into Uruguay’s interior to visit a ranch. Uruguay has many tourist ranches, which range from very fancy to basic. This one was a family run working ranch with 1000 head of cattle, several horses, chickens, two geese that mysteriously disappeared during the weekend (only their feathers remained), and a number of sheep recently diminished by preparations for a large group lunch.
To get there we drove three hours into Uruguay’s interior mostly on a tree-lined two-lane highway that cut through gently rolling green fields populated by cattle, horses, sheep, birds, and outcroppings of rocks. There were some cultivated fields and places where farm buildings were visible. Occasionally we watched gauchos ride across fields or farmers maneuver huge farm equipment across the highway.
Somewhere between Trinidad and Durazno there was a faded sign pointing down a rutted dirt road toward the ranch. The road dipped down to cross a stream and on the other side cattle stood knee deep in swirling early evening mist. The ranch itself was a few white washed one story buildings with thatched roofs and some outbuildings surrounded by manicured lawns with nothing but pasture beyond. We were greeted by five barking dogs who chased our car down the winding drive. They were intimidating until we opened the car doors when they promptly stopped barking and prostrated themselves before us, waiting to be pet.
Our room was attached to the main house and was accessed through a walled garden, which was crowded with flowering plants and small trees. A porch ran along one side of the house, dormant wisteria vines climbing up the poles and over the roof. The door to our room, as well as doors to the kitchen and entry way, opened off the porch. Our room was a clean, high-ceilinged, spartan space with three beds covered in wool blankets, wooden shuttered windows, stone walls, and a moldering armoire filled with dusty extra blankets.
Before we had our coats off Mariela and her assistant Iris were feeding us. We ate our meals in a small room with a thatched ceiling, a sturdy wooden table and carved straight-back chairs, a huge fireplace (which was the only thing keeping the damp chill at bay), and two pink armchairs that felt like sitting inside a warm hug. The room was dark and cold away from the fire, but also appealing and cozy.
Mariela and Iris always brought us soup in a traditional cast iron pot with white bread and butter on the side. This was followed by delicious, but rich, dishes like canalones de choclo, milanesa de berenjena, and zapallitos rellenos. And this was followed by dessert. They made other dishes that would please the kids as well, but in quantities large enough for several busloads of children. Two meals in Nathan and I realized we were eating past hunger and on into guilt. No matter how many servings we ladled onto our plates, we didn’t seem to make a dent in the spread. Yet somehow after every meal, as we waddled out of the room, they worried that we were leaving hungry.
To work off the food we explored outside. We watched the sheep who, understandably, were not so fond of people. The kids picked the pink flowers that grew in the yard. We rode horses around a bucolic field (bucolic as long as you didn’t look down at the sheep skulls chewed clean by the dogs and bleached by the sun). The kids climbed on the various tractors. The fact that it was a working ranch, not just a tourist destination, was always apparent. At one point I found the boy staring transfixed at piles of sheep skins hanging from a rafter in the barn. Trying to rationalize it, he suggested maybe they had been able to remove all the fleece so it just looked like a skin, but the sheep were still alive. There was a disappointing experience with milking that involved a year old cow, her still nursing calf, and a very sticky udder.
The ranch had plenty of entertainment to offer, but we also managed to tear ourselves away long enough to see some other sights. Outside Trinidad is a large, well-kept, and free animal reserve. We spent a few hours there looking at carpinchos, monkeys, alpacas, rabbits, snakes, deer, goats, and the cutest swarm of guinea pigs (including baby guinea pigs).
Some twenty kilometers down a bumpy road in Flores are the Grutas del Palacio. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Grutas are 70 million year old naturally occurring limestone caves. Columns of stone and curved archways formed by millions of years of erosion give the impression of some intricately planned architecture. There are places where, with the help of a guide, you can walk back into the caves, stepping over puddles of water and into ancient history. Given the chance there are many reasons you should visit them, but our kids will tell you the best part was the flashlights they got to carry while exploring the caves.
On our last day at the Ranch, still well-stuffed from lunch and not yet ready for dinner, the owners took us for a drive to see some of the cattle and their property. They pointed out their cattle, distant property lines, and birds while we all made awkward conversation. A short way into the drive we discovered three yearlings who had escaped the pasture. We followed them in the pick up truck, Mariela leaning out the window making the same huffing noises cows make. Eventually, for some reason neither Nathan nor I could discern all three calves decided to plow back through the barbed wire fence into the pasture. Across the road curious cattle gathered to watch the show. Mariela knelt down in the ditch again making soft blowing sounds and grunts, which urged the cattle forward. We all stared at each for awhile as the light turned golden.
We are terrible tourists. That’s probably an exaggeration, but I do find those “36 hours in…” articles in The New York Times more exhausting than inspiring. So maybe not terrible tourists, but probably lazy ones. We try to find a few things that appeal to all of us, see them and then spend time napping, hanging out, wandering around, and eating.
The kids and I spent a morning hiking up the Cerro de Sta. Lucia, a large hill and park in the city with green spaces, fountains, ornate building facades, and a whole lot of stone steps. We climbed halfway up on a sidewalk that skirted a steep drop before the kids thought they might be done. Admittedly, the views were pretty nice even from there and the climb was steep for short legs, but they were also particularly whiny that day. Promises of castles and towers were enough to convince them to keep walking. Stone steps, worn completely smooth in some places, led off to the right and we followed them up and around as they stopped or turned or forked. We didn’t pay much too much attention to where we were going as long as we were headed up. At the very top there was a clear and breathtaking view of the entire city and the mountains beyond. I don’t have many pictures from this trip since making sure the girl didn’t fall off the edge or into the fountains or moat took all of my concentration. She only fell halfway down one flight of fairly gentle stone steps. A victory!
What you couldn’t see from so high up were the narrow side streets lined with cafes, trees, and stores. Some were pedestrian streets and others just lightly trafficked by cars. Places like this always make me a bit melancholy for times when traveling meant plopping down at one of these cafes for a coffee and a rest without answering 5,326 questions about the waiter’s every word or without treating the other patrons to a full-length dance performance by our children.
On our way to the Plaza de Armas, which was largely under construction but still beautiful, we passed through a restaurant gallery. It was a long passageway lined with hot dog stands on one side and sit down restaurants (still serving a lot of hot dogs) on the other side. Even at the 10 in the morning people were leaning against the stands’ counters eating hotdogs mostly hidden under the layers of toppings; a thick layer of avocado and a quarter inch deep squiggle of mayonnaise being the two most visible.
We also passed through here on our way to the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, a place that is totally worth the effort of visiting, even for very lazy tourists. The museum has recently changed locations to a refurbished building housing new exhibits of ancient artifacts. Inside, the walls and floors are a mixture of white and warm, deep grey, which creates a calming background to the three floors of pre-Columbian art that is organized by cultural areas. Through a revolving door in a corner of the second floor is the textile room. Think about the awesomeness of that. I mean, I have sweatpants from five years ago that are disintegrating. These textiles were found well-preserved in very dry and dark caves and are now preserved in a dark, climate-controlled room behind plates of glass. Motion sensor lights turn on to spotlight a shirt made of feathers or a fragment of intricately woven fabric. There are drawers that slide out with the push of a button to give a closer look at things like dying techniques.
Made of feathers
Quipu
The Parque Forestal, a long, largely unbroken span of green space in the city, was the perfect place for some touristing with minimal effort. The Museo de Bellas Artes is located there. We never made it inside, but even from the outside the building was beautiful. We couldn’t argue with missing the art museum when there were two full-equipped playgrounds to explore. Montevideo’s playgrounds–with their wooden and metal slides and flagstone paving stones under the swings–are entirely charming, but a little variety in the way of soft landings and complex climbing structures was exciting.
On the other side of the Parque Forestal is the Cerro de San Cristobal, which has an incline railway you can ride to the top. After seeing the line that snaked on for what must have been over an hour wait we decided to go on foot as high as we could. That turned out to be zoo level. I won’t bore you with my navel gazing about the pros and cons of zoos, though the the animals in this one appeared to be extremely well cared for and the zoo has a mission of protection and education. The kids had a great time running up and down the terraced paths, which made it possible to be almost eye level with a giraffe, and looking at every animal they could fit into the hour before the zoo closed.
Humor.
Animals also showed up in unexpected places, like the Centro Artesanal los Domínicos, a sprawling market of wooden stalls at the foot of the Andes selling a wide variety of handmade goods. The crafts ranged from nice to kistch and we ended up buying nothing, but the space itself was nice with a couple of cafes, a stream, wandering cats, a large cage of birds, and two pet stores. While there we tried sopaipillasdulces, a fried flour dough served with a sweet syrup of chancaca. It’s a Chilean version of the various fried doughs that exist in many, many parts of the world.
Last on our lists of sites was the Museo Interactive Mirador, an interactive educational museum with a large outdoor playground and cafe. There are museums like this around the world and our kids would happily visit them all. This one was done well with activities suited to lots of ages. The girl enjoyed making things move and light up while the boy was more curious about the why and the how (though he was too overwhelmed with excitement to really absorb the information).
And that, my friends, is just about it. We ate some delicious Indian food and some mediocre Indian food (but still Indian food!). We had some sushi. We ate ice cream. We shopped at a grocery store that had so many things we’ve been missing (like better yogurt). We never got around to trying mote con huesillo, a traditional drink made of peach nectar mixed with cooked husked wheat.
Valparaiso burned while we were there and signs went up everywhere encouraging people to donate goods or money. A Chilean woman I met in Montevideo explained that all Chileans felt impacted by the fires. It overshadowed the also recent earthquake in northern Chile.
We came home via the SeaCat, but in first class this time because that’s all that was available. Lest you be concerned this made us full of ourselves, you should know that we boarded the boat via the port’s storage shed by way of a parking lot and that SeaCat first class is higher in altitude, but not actual class (not even the plastic glass filled with something like champagne they served will sway me on this point).
The Buquebus Ferry from Uruguay to Buenos Aires is like a cruise ship. When the sun catches its perfectly shiny outside as it glides across the river the whole thing seems to glow. Even its name, Francisco, in honor of the Pope, sounds regal. They require you wear white booties (like those of crime scene investigators) onboard so your philistine shoes do not damage the boat’s pristine floors. Inside it has plush chairs, deep carpeting, sweeping staircases, a well-stocked snack bar, and a duty-free shop the size of a small grocery store. The boat is so large and so weighted with people, cars, luggage, and duty-free Toblerone chocolate that you barely feel it moving.
This was not the boat we took.
No. On the day when meteorologists were predicting 60 mph winds, we took the SeaCat, which is a glorified pontoon boat where luggage is lashed to the deck and covered with tarps. I admit that watching it bounce and skip into the port caused me a low level of panic. Watching passengers around us ready their bright white, plastic barf bags for the journey did nothing to calm me. And when they slammed the doors shut and told everyone to sit tight because while the journey might not look or feel safe it definitely was, I may have turned to Nathan and told him I wanted to get off. I didn’t get off, mostly because I couldn’t.
The televisions proudly told us that the boat traveled at a speed of 30 knots. It did not tell us how much air space there can be between your bottom cheeks and the seat when the boat hits waves at that speed. Several is the answer. It also did not tell you how loudly people may shriek, in both fear and joy, when this happens. Really loudly and shrilly with the notable exception of the gentleman who just groaned as if he were dying. Our children responded in their usual ways. The boy said he wasn’t pleased, but it certainly didn’t stop him from eating or talking. The girl spent her time singing and pointing out to our neighbors that we were on a boat! On the water!We made it to Buenos Aires and spent an evening with an Aunt and an Uncle before heading on to Santiago de Chile.
I’m not usually one to get worked up about seeing something just for the sake of seeing it, but have you seen the Andes from 30,000 feet? I felt a little like the girl, wanting to nudge people around me and say, Look! Big mountains! With snow! Judging by the way the Chilean woman next to me (who I’m just going to wildly speculate had seen the mountain range before and possibly even from high altitudes) kept leaning over to take pictures and videos until the flight attendant told her she really, really had to shut it down for landing, I don’t think I’m exaggerating their awesome beauty. Really, my feelings didn’t change much once we were on the ground. Walking around in the city we’d look up and catch sight of the mountains–sometimes snow-capped, sometimes frosty with fog, sometimes glowing pink in the sunset, and sometimes just massive and brown–and gasp. There is something very humbling about being in a city of 5 million people, of being surrounded by crowds, traffic, skyscrapers, restaurants, and all the fine trappings of modern civilization, and having all of it dwarfed in magnitude and beauty by some ancient rock and dirt. Check yourselves humans.
From the plane
Mountains!
From our hotel!
With the river!
In the morning! With a moon!
With snow!
With sunset!
With more sunset!
Montevideo, both in area and population, could fit into Santiago’s hip pocket, so it’s entirely unfair to compare them. However, I’m not going to let that stop me. Chile is very different than Uruguay. That should be obvious, right? They are different countries with different histories, different climates, different cultures, etc. I shouldn’t even need to say it, but both Nathan and I were caught off guard. I think having only traveled between Uruguay and Argentina in the past 9 months it was easy for us to lose sight of the bigger picture. Argentines and Uruguayans will spend any amount of time telling you about how different they are from each other. And they are. The accents are different enough that you can distinguish them. Argentines use a kettle for their mate while Uruguayans tend to use a thermos. Argentines eat lomitos and Urguayans eat chivitos. I’m joking a little of course, because there are real differences between the two countries, but things are also similar enough that both cities feel familiar.
Chile was a different story altogether. In the airport I heard people talking and briefly wondered what language they were speaking. We were so accustomed to the lilt of Uruguayan Spanish that the harder and completely distinct sounds of Chilean speech sounded entirely strange.
The Spaniards didn’t manage to kill off all the indigenous people in Chile like they did in Uruguay, so there was a much broader mix of people. In fact, there were people (and foods) from all over the world.
We ate Japanese food (without any cream cheese added!), Indian food, spicy food (oh, spicy food!), Chilean-style ice cream and so many avocados (hot dogs are even served with a thick layer of avocado). According to a PSA we saw, Chile is second only to Suriname in its sugar consumption, which may explain why when we ordered juice we were served uncarbonated orange Fanta.
The streets were cleaner in Santiago. Less trash blew around and there was so little dog poop on the sidewalks that I almost forgot to look down while I walked.
Santiago also felt somewhat less child friendly. Of course, this is an observation based on limited time and experiences. One of those experiences did include a woman insisting that the girl give up her seat on the subway. I can’t imagine that happening in Montevideo where people practically leap out of their seats to make room for kids. To be fair, Uruguayans are particularly accommodating to and appreciative of kids. It’s rare to make it through an entire outing in Montevideo without our kids being patted on the head, chatted with, pressed for a kiss, or offered candy by people young and old alike–and that’s even when they are being totally obnoxious. Maybe, though, it’s just a difference of living in a place versus being a tourist for a brief time.
And we were tourists Santiago. More on how we touristed in a bit.
Here’s the short version: Phoebe and her family came to visit. It was great. We went to the beach a lot. We traveled. We saw many sunsets. We ate. Some of the food was really good. Sometimes it was just nice to be together. Eric ate a lot of beef. We went to Buenos Aires. It was fun. They went home. That was bittersweet.
Let me back up. A lot.
On Christmas Day after months of anticipation, weeks of planning, and hours of travel (for them), Phoebe and her family arrived in Montevideo for a ten day visit. The excitement and joy of seeing dear friends after a long absence is really only surpassed by how quickly you forget how long you’ve been apart; that these people haven’t been with you all along. I don’t know exactly how to tell you about their visit. At night after the kids went to bed I jotted down notes on the day. Notes that quickly filled two pages and could have filled more if my hand hadn’t cramped and my eyes hadn’t drooped. Sometimes I want to recount every day in gratuitous detail and sometimes I can’t imagine trying to recount the experiences of eight people over ten days.
During the first few days heat followed us everywhere. My memories are of sweating. On the bus to the port where we went to find Eric’s first of many, many chivitos, I remember watching the beads of sweat form on Mette’s nose as she and all the children gradually melted into the plastic seats. When Phoebe and I finally went to get her long-promised suitcase worth of Uruguayan yarn, it seemed impossible to believe that we would ever again require woolen anything. We set up fans in our apartment and then everyone fought for space in front of them. Everyone except Eric who was often leaning out the window admiring the heat and the view. We allotted the kids time in the air conditioned hotel room to cool off and veg out.
We rented two high-mileage, low frills, American sedans (one with a faulty check engine light and the other with barely working air conditioning) and followed each other first east and then west down busy and empty highways. At our destination we would trade stories of near misses with inattentive drivers, of crossing six lane highways in the dark, of motorcycles with families of five crammed onto the seat, of roadside castles, of packed roadside restaurants, and of brush fires. We drove into the heat of the day to get places and then drove home in the cool, near black of night.
Toward the east there was a mass of other people trying to get to the beaches, to second homes, to hotels, to cabins. Out past the city in the east the there were small towns with small cement houses and dirt roads. There were grocery stores, lumber yards, and plant nurseries. Then there was nothing but scrub-filled fields, marshy patches with horses grazing, and forests of pine and eucalyptus until the next town or until a road jogged off to the right leading to the coast.
The first beach we visited was covered in rocks and deserted except for a man and woman freely exploring each other’s anatomy. The wind here was cooler than in the city. The water crashed in foamy cold waves that the children waded into without hesitation, regardless of their ability to swim. We drove farther east to Piriápolis. Here, just a few miles down the coast, the sand was baby powder soft, the water calm, and the beach crowded with families.
The next day a friend invited us to his beach house for an asado. He sweated over the wood-fired grill laden with various cuts of meat (and a few vegetables) while the rest of us drank and ate. We walked the red dirt roads of the town past one-story cement houses to the beach. Following us as we walked were eerie and alarming cries that sounded like packs of kittens, or maybe feral babies. It sounded at first like the sound came from the tall roadside grasses, but we soon realized they were echoing from the storm drains. The more we listened the spookier it became. We imagined colonies of all sorts of creatures living underground and the wrath they could unleash. Our friend told us they were toads. Not killer toads or radioactive toads. Just toads. He said this quite nonchalantly as if it would be hard to mistake the sound for anything else. I still kind of wonder, though. They sounded a lot like feral babies to me.
To get to the beach here we had to follow a path through large dunes. Then the beach, filled with families, spread out before us. Waves crashed huge here, though the water smelled more like the river than the ocean. Phoebe and I had somehow not connected the beach with swimming, so we stood at the water’s edge while everyone else dove through the waves. Our friend picked up the slack for us by throwing any willing child into the waves or offering himself as a human boogie board; and when one child tired he found a better rested one.
Solís
Rambla in Piriápolis
Piriápolis
Heading west the highway was eerily empty. It was hotter heading this way and the highway farther from the water. Phoebe has rightly pointed out that this is a serious understatement. It was hot enough that she worried that the cars would melt. Or that the faulty check engine light on their car would turn out to not be faulty and we would all melt at the side of the road. The fields were more cultivated and dotted with cows, sheep, and, to our delight, a herd of goats. In some places cows stood under palm trees for shade; something Phoebe and I found hilariously incongruous. The towns had names like the cheeses we had sampled in the market, like Cufre and Danbo. There were honor system roadside stands, which lacked refrigeration, advertising fresh cheese and sweet cheese. We turned off the highway around kilometer 55 driving down a sycamore lined road to a tiny town where the sand was flat and wide. People beached themselves on sand bars like seals, wallowing there in the warm water that was flat and shallow for ages. Driftwood lay on the beach and trees leaned down from jagged dunes.
Pasture and Palm Trees
On the road west
The road to El Ensueño, Uruguay
Santa Ana, Uruguay
Santa Ana, Uruguay
Our first afternoon in western Uruguay was one those days that felt so dry and hot that spontaneous combustion wouldn’t have been surprising. The air smelled of Eucalyptus, dust, and cooking meat. Phoebe and I let Nathan and Eric sort out finding gas for the nearly empty cars while we turned up the air conditioner in the cabins to arctic blast, let the children plug into any form of technology they wanted, put up our feet, and gently infused the afternoon with gin. Then we talked until the light started to fade, the children needed to be aired, and our husbands returned victorious.
The eight of us watched the sunset nearly every night of the trip. We watched the sky turn orange and then fade to dark from Montevideo, from eastern and western beaches, from the terrace of a pizza place in Colonia, and from the rooftop pool of our hotel in Buenos Aires. How is it that night after night that show never gets old? For me, it was the time each day when I would think, “Here we are on the other side of the world from home. Together.” Every night I’d be amazed. Plus, they were just crazy beautiful sunsets.
Montevideo
Piriápolis
Colonia
On New Year’s Eve, on an empty beach in western Uruguay while the kids finished popsicles, laughed and ran, and got wetter than we had authorized we watched the sun sink on 2013. After we had trooped home, the children had gone to sleep, and our husbands had gone on to other things, Phoebe and I slipped outside in our pajamas to wait for midnight and share a bottle of champagne she had had the foresight to buy before leaving Montevideo. Fireworks, out of sight but not out of earshot, let us know when the hour finally clicked over to a new year. Our conversation, though, continued unchanged. Before turning in for the night we passed the half-full bottle across the fence the neighbors who showed no signs of retiring anytime soon.
With ten days of meals, some are sure to be unremarkable, but on vacation in a place entirely new sometimes even boxed macaroni and cheese eaten out of a bowl balanced on your lap can feel festive. Even when the food wasn’t great, there was almost always something to make the meal memorable. At a restaurant cheerful in decor and lacking in service where we waited over an hour for mediocre food, Otto lost his second tooth.
And sometimes the most memorable food appeared where we least expected it. After a hot walk on the beach into town we stopped at the first restaurant we found. It was unassuming, but open. We sat on a patio
Pizza place, Colonia, Uruguay
overlooking the beach and ate one of our best meals. Eric talked about that chivito for the rest of the trip. It’s worth saying again that Eric ate a lot of chivitos and then Argentine lomitos. He examined menus, consulted with Nathan on translations and then ordered meat, which he never failed to enjoy. I felt like I finally got to experience the much talked about South American meat dishes, thankfully without having to eat any of it myself.
In Buenos Aires Phoebe and I went out for a late night dessert date to a famous confiteria where the decor was amazing, the waiters entirely old world gangster, and where the pies, while delicious, were weighted like bricks.
Of course, we had to eat Uruguayan pizza at least once. We took them to our favorite pizza place in Montevideo and they all tried fainá, which Nathan had been raving about for almost five years. Then Eric found a pizza place in Colonia that had tiered patios overlooking the water and combined Uruguayan pizza with more American ideas of toppings. I still think about that pizza.
Our family almost didn’t make it to Buenos Aires for the last leg of the trip. Uruguayans, including temporary residents, have to provide birth certificates in addition to ID cards for all children. Of course we didn’t know this and there was no budging the woman at immigration who could hardly even be bothered to come to the window. Nathan took a wild ride in a taxi driving twice the legal limit on the Rambla to collect the birth certificates. In the end it turns out the surly woman in immigration was fairly lenient. One birth certificate was expired (everything here expires) and one wasn’t even the right version. Finally, with the clunk of a stamp, we were cleared to leave. We made it on board with minutes to spare. I even got to do some movie-like fist pump while Phoebe and family cheered our arrival.
We thought driving in Uruguay was pretty exciting, but the experience of riding Buenos Aires taxis made that seem tame. Taxis were inexpensive and uncrowded compared with the subway so there were many wild rides. One though, topped all others. Out of the line of waiting taxis outside a shopping mall, Phoebe, the girls and I grabbed one at random. The driver, standing outside his taxi while eating a cup of ice cream, seemed to have a bit of swagger, but it wasn’t until we were settled in the backseat that it began to dawn on us what we had gotten ourselves into. The front of his otherwise dingy cab was decked out with faux chrome plating, a smaller sporty steering wheel, and a whole lot of nitrous gauges. He slammed the door and took off, heel-and-toe shifting his way through clogged streets. At a traffic light he stopped short, yanked up the hand brake, and strolled to a nearby trash can to throw away his empty ice cream cup. He slammed the door just in time to catch the changing light. This was the only traffic light he obeyed. He ran through at least eight other red lights. He swerved sharply around cars, cutting as close to them as possible for greater dramatic effect. Just as our neighborhood drew into sight Mette fell sound asleep in what I can only assume was a slightly delayed response to terror. While we arrived a few minutes earlier than the boys’ taxi, our wild ride, as evidenced by the higher fare, took us much farther afield.
When we weren’t being flung around inside flying taxis, we spent hours exploring the city. We spent a couple of hours in the beautifully morbid Recoleta cemetery where shiny mausoleums muscle each other for space. Evita Perón is buried here and there is always a crowd around her perfectly maintained crypt. Phoebe and I though both found it was the crumbling tombs, where vases of fake flowers lay broken and cobwebs spread across caskets like lace doilies, that drew us in the most.
In the Japanese Gardens we fed the giant carp that roiled in anticipation of the small food pellets. We visited the small and beautiful art museum.
We set the children loose in El Museo de los Niños where they climbed through a giant toilet, ran a bank, made a television program, and grocery shopped. None of them wanted to leave.
We visited a famous bookstore housed in a refurbished theater that Eric has been thinking about for years. The balconies, box seats, the stage, and all the period decor had been meticulously preserved.
When we needed a break from the hustle we spread out in one of our giant two bedroom apartments or lounged in the rooftop pool, which was the perfect depth for half the kids to figure out swimming, one to show off his fish-like abilities, and one to dance until exhaustion put her in danger of drowning.
Before we knew it our time was up. To spare the tears and the sadness, goodbyes are generally best kept brief. That’s how we said goodbye at the end of ten days together and it’s how I’ll say it here. They went home, which is a good feeling even after the best of vacations–even when it is 100 degrees colder (no, I’m not exaggerating) than where you left. And we went back to a place that felt that much more like home for them having had been there.
Around the time leaves were appearing here and Phoebe was emerging there, the boy and the girl were exploding with language. It felt not unlike the long wait for spring. We had greeted every new word spoken and every phrase understood with joy, but fluency never seemed forthcoming. And then, like with the spring, we looked away. We got distracted by other things only to look up one day and realize our children had blossomed into Spanish speakers. Suddenly, they were speaking to people and all their shyness disappeared.
Now, they are perhaps even bolder when speaking Spanish than English. The boy strikes up conversations with the porteros, asks questions of strangers and teachers, and yells to his friends about bottoms, boogers, and how exactly they should crash into each other. The girl still mostly speaks in shorter sentences, phrases and songs, but it doesn’t stop her from holding court in the apartment lobby to explain the intricacies of the most recent party at school. And it doesn’t stop her from from calling out to her friends’ parents or perfect strangers on the street to share some piece of news. It helps that people here are so obliging. Women of a certain age will sing along with her songs and ask if she means to share the candy she’s showing them. She still has a tendency to speak to us in long strings of nonsense words with a marked Spanish cadence, but every day more and more words emerge from the stream of sound until I start to wonder if the fault lies more with her ability to speak or my ability to understand. They sing pop songs (terrible pop songs), school songs, and made up songs without pause. The girl has things for which she rarely uses the English word for anymore and the boy pronounces some English words and names (thumb drive, Jackson Pollack) with an Uruguayan accent. They both pretend laugh in Spanish (ja, ja, ja) and they both use culturally appropriate gestures to express emotions.
Their grammar is definitely creative and often wrong, but nearly always understood. The boy mostly conjugates verbs as ‘you’ even when he is talking about himself and the girl tends to use ‘I’ even when she is talking about someone else. (Definitely take a moment to armchair psychoanalyze that.) At home they speak to each other, themselves, and us in this pidgin Spanish. Sometimes they even speak it when they are sleep. Before, no matter how much we spoke to them in Spanish they responded in English. Now, they almost universally respond to Spanish with Spanish, and sometimes to English with Spanish. Often they will be playing together (or likely arguing) in English when one of them will say a word in Spanish and just like that the language will switch and the conversation (or likely the argument) will continue without interruption.
It seems like forever ago that we were reveling in those first few words and sounds. Sometimes it’s hard for us to remember what it was like then when they barely spoke or understood. The boy told us last night he was sure he has always spoke Spanish this well. While it is still amazing to hear their language continue to develop, at this stage there are times when it feels like the sole result of taking them halfway around the world and immersing them in a new culture is that they now have two languages in which to argue and whine. No matter, we’ll take it.
The other day I had to take the bus downtown for a meeting. I knew about where I was going, but I still get a little nervous about recognizing landmarks and finding my way. The buses and streets get crowded closer to the center of the city, and I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize the plaza that marked my stopped. I could have asked the driver, but I couldn’t remember the name of the plaza, which I had written down and then lost. Also, the driver had a plaque at the front of the bus that read, “Warning: Sex Addict.” I’m sure he meant it as a…I don’t know how he meant it, but it wasn’t encouraging me to run up front and ask his advice.
So I was nervous about getting there and I was watching the street signs long before I needed to watch them and I was wrapped up in my thoughts about getting to this meeting and not being late and finding my way and what I would say during the meeting, when the bus stopped and a man with a guitar got on. He and the driver spoke for a moment. The driver turned off the radio. The man with the guitar walked to the back of bus where I was sitting. And I was thinking about how I needed to get to the plaza and trying to remember where I needed to get off and wondering if this was the place where the road forked or if it was farther along.
The man with guitar started to talk about the song he would play. I wasn’t really listening because I was wondering if, like a couple of weeks ago, the bus would without any warning take a detour for half the route, and if it did if I could still find my way. The man strummed the first notes of his song. I noticed the smell of his body, unwashed but not really unclean, just musky and tangy and powerfully strong. I thought about how I was not in the mood for some guy who smelled so strongly to be playing music just behind my head.
He started to sing. I forgot about my meeting. I forgot about my forgotten directions. I forgot about the woman next to me, yawning incessantly like she was Dorothy in the poppy field. I forgot about my annoyance and about his pungent smell. His voice was so purely beautiful and so unexpected that I cried. I heard the words of the song and I understood them, but I can’t remember a single one. I only remember his voice and how it sounded singing just behind my ear.
Just as suddenly as he had started he was done. He thanked us for our applause and pointed out that money was nice, too. He collected a some coins from passengers and he was gone. My plaza came up and I recognized it and I went to my meeting and eventually I went home on another bus.
What’s the point of this story? I guess the point could be a lot of things. It could be that a man with a voice that beautiful is bus hopping, getting pesos for his songs while no talent hacks are making millions. It could be that my fretting nearly distracted me from something amazing. It could be that beauty shows up in unexpected places. In the moment and now, it’s not so much any of those things or it’s all of those things. It’s that the other day I was riding a bus and I heard the man sing so beautifully that I cried.
Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the mindset that this is an Amazing Experience™, a Unique Opportunity™, and that Life is Short ™. We forget that we’re here for longer than a vacation and we don’t have to cram everything we want to see, do, and experience into a few days, weeks, or even months. Which is good to remember, because sometimes in life you just need to cancel everything, put on pajamas, and hole up at home for a few days. So we did.
We convinced the boy to skip what would have been his fourth birthday party in three weeks. Until Montevideo, all our kid birthday party experiences had been homespun, low-key affairs. So for us the parties here were a total shock. The boy adored each and every one and would happily attend a perfect stranger’s party, but they left him exhausted for days. They were held in places with names like La Manzana Azul, Adorato, and Abrakadabra, which specialize in kids’ birthday parties. Employees checked the children in at the door while the parents left a cell phone number before leaving altogether. For three hours the children were entertained by magicians, bouncy castles, dance music, food, cake, cotton candy, candy, piñatas, puppets, video games, and more. The arrival of each invitation, while met with great excitement, reminded us of how much we still live on the fringes of the average Uruguayan schedule. These parties went from around afternoon tea until dinner, which for our still very much American schedule was more between dinner and please-just-go-to-sleep-already. So this one party raged on without him while he happily stayed home, drew his way through half a ream of paper, and played quiet games of go-fish.
By Sunday afternoon the paper was running low and the games were running more toward yelling and jumping. Plus, we couldn’t ignore the sunlight and warm air filtering in from outside. After much blustering and procrastinating we finally made it outside into a day that felt almost like Spring. Even the trees looked a little greener around the edges. We wandered out without much direction until we remembered that on Sunday afternoons the golf course changes over from private club to public park. It felt strange to walk through the guarded gate and out onto the golf course, but before long the pull of those acres of rolling green grass, the faint smell of the eucalyptus trees, and the hushed silence of being farther from cars and machines than we have been in two months took over. The next hour was spent charging over fairways, watching flocks of parrots and Southern Lapwings, collecting pinecones, feathers, and sticks, climbing trees, and rolling rapturously on the grass.
On Monday with the kids back in school–possibly being exposed to the latest in their infectious tour of Uruguay, Scarlet Fever and Gastroenteritis–I finally broke the barrier of the five block radius around our apartment. I know there are other neighborhoods to explore. There are side-streets and avenues. There are coffee shops, panaderias, museums and much more out there to find. But, when the sun shines bright and the children are not my responsibility, I can’t turn my feet away from the Rambla–that ribbon of pedestrian walk that follows the coast in and out along its wavy line. Sometimes the wind whips off the water with such force that I have to lean into it to move forward. Trees growing in the fields between sidewalk and water have given into the will of the wind and permanently lean toward the land. The water stretches out to the horizon as if it were the ocean. On the grass there are often dogs running free, stopping now and then to deposit feces on the ground that their owners studiously ignore. In the mornings when I go there are always groups of older men walking in groups of two or four always debating and pontificating. There are younger people out for jogs and strolls. There are workers resting against the wall or on the rocks sharing a mate. And as the weather warms, lip-locked couples have begun to sprout from benches and walls. The open space, even if it is flanked on one side by a busy highway, feels like a short escape from closeness of the city.
Sunday afternoon view of the Rambla
Walking on the Rambla
Rambla
Finally, I turned back inland. As I walked into the shadows of buildings, I started thinking about about how unoccupied the apartment buildings and houses can look from the street level. I remember feeling the same way when I first got to the Burg. The houses were pretty from the front, but the facades set right against the sidewalk gave little hint of the lives lived inside. I would walk instead through the alleys where there were glimpses of gardens and play equipment. There were sounds of people talking, laughing, and laughing. It wasn’t just an exercise in voyeurism. When I didn’t have my own life in the Burg, it was immensely comforting to see and hear people living theirs. I haven’t seen an alley yet in Montevideo, but I’m finding the same comfort in seeing other people’s laundry drying outside apartment windows or flapping on lines strung across rooftops. There is something humanizing and intimate about seeing the textile components of strangers’ lives hanging out in what is still, to me, an otherwise largely unknown city.
Exhaustion is the foreign transaction fee levied on our lives right now. I understand my daughter’s habit of sliding slowly down to the floor during the upward elevator ride to home. By the end she lays sprawled flat, arms and legs flung out, insisting she will only exit by scooching her body out the door. “No, no, no,” she screams in a voice that must bounce and ping its way down the elevator shaft and into the homes of each of the other 19 apartments. I understand it because right now otherwise routine tasks, like grocery shopping, require extra thought and energy, which leaves us at a slight deficit by the end of the week.
The grocery store, with its bright lights, amply stocked shelves of everything from toilet paper to specialty cheeses, and background soundtrack of eighties pop music felt deceptively familiar at first, but only at first. Here there are people constantly cleaning, restocking, and offering assistance. There are half aisles devoted to yerba, mayonnaise, and alfajores. Yerba is better known in North America as Mate. Here it is a staple of many Uruguayans lives; not even a recent 18% price increase is likely to slow consumption. Alfajores consist of dulce de leche sandwiched between two cookies, which are sometimes coated in chocolate. While they can be and are eaten at any time of the day or night, alfajores are found in the breakfast aisle next to a very small selection of cereals.
Things like spices, condiments, milk, and cleaning supplies are, whenever possible, packaged in bags instead of bottles or cartons. At our local grocery store baking soda is not available in any kind of container. It requires a separate trip to the pharmacy and has to be requested from the pharmacist.
After once coming home with fruit scented sponges, we learned to check everything non-edible for added scent. I spent a sneeze-filled half hour in the detergent aisle before finally finding one very dusty bottle of imported perfume- and dye-free detergent. If I wanted to I could always add some smell post-wash with clothing perfume. I laughed at the idea, but since Sunday washing often ends up smelling like it was dried over a meat-laden parilla, I’m reconsidering my rush to judgement.
I have also spent the equivalent of several hours staring at the wall of yogurts that, while not perfumed, are almost universally sweetened and then stabilized with a mixture of gelatin, pectin, agar, and starch. Even the white yogurt called Natural is sweetened with heaps of natural sugar; juice is also mostly only available in sweetened or really sweetened. Yogurt can come in a carton or a yogurt container or a bag or a bottle. The resulting confections, while questionable in their cultures, are often delicious.
I stand in slack-jawed wonder in the dairy aisle while other shoppers push past me to grab a bag of milk and deposit it expertly into a plastic produce bag to prevent leaks. I aspire to their fluid ease and their confidence in their selections. They sail in and out of aisles grabbing packages of this and that while I am still hunched over trying to read ingredients listed in Spanish, or just as often Portuguese, in a font so minuscule it makes my eyes cross. By the end, I am frazzled, often damp with sweat, completely exhausted, and slightly exhilarated. I leave victorious in the moment, clutching my purchases like hard won prizes, and hopeful that next time it will only take me ten minutes to find the right floor cleaner.
“Uno, dos, tres. Pato. Pato,” our daughter sings as she touches her fingertips lightly together. “There is a tree in the yard at school that in the summer produces pears,” our son explains to us in English, but reflecting the Spanish words in which he first heard it. These are small indicators of the great strides out children are making here.
Before we arrived in Montevideo we spoke to our children in Spanish with a haphazard level of discipline. We read them Spanish books, listened to Spanish music, and carried on conversations in Spanish until they rolled their eyes and screamed, “Say it in English.” There, Spanish was just a novelty, spoken by a few and never really needed. They rarely responded in Spanish, but they both still understood a fair amount.
Then, after our ample warnings, they were without warning immersed in Spanish. Here, our apartment was the only refuge from a buffeting stormy sea of questions, requests, greetings, signs, and overheard conversations–all in Spanish. We thought maybe all that latent language we’d been cultivating for years would just rise to the surface, but instead it was as if a huge wave of Spanish rose up and pummeled every last bit of understanding out of them. A cheery hola from the doorman was met with panicked blank stares. Simple commands they had followed without thinking for years needed to be translated and parsed.
So we did the only natural and compassionate thing parents can do in this situation. A week after we arrived we plopped them down in a small, welcoming, but purely Uruguayan school named after a popular left-leaning cartoon character. Beyond the blue locked metal gate is a yellow building that houses a clean, bright world of children aged two to six. Our children, like all the other children, wear the school uniform–a green, plush-lined tracksuit for the older children and a plaid, long-sleeved tunic for the younger. And they, like all the other children, are welcomed each morning with euphoric greetings, hugs and kisses from their teachers. The first half of the day of the day is entirely in Spanish. The older children, who stay the whole day, spend the second half with English-speaking teachers. This is a place of learning, of play, of mess, of noise, and apparently of great joy.
We expected our children to come home exhausted and overwhelmed. Of course there would be a period of adjustment and resistance. No one can expect children to start school midway through the year in a completely new country, language, culture, and community without some problems. They would be homesick. This would be normal and we were ready to be supportive and firm. We were not prepared for our daughter to wake up on weekends tearful because she could not go to school. Nor were we prepared to contend with our son’s bouncing exuberance and energy after an 7.5 to 9 hour school day. We were certainly not prepared that they would be so happy that they would simply accept the new language, culture and community as part school.
After the first week of school they started bringing home the names of their classmates. They tried out the unfamiliar sounds of Valentina, Santi, Martín, Cata, Diego, Pupe, and Jaoquín in conversation with us and in their private mutterings. At a dinner one night when discussing nachos, our daughter’s head snapped up. “There a Nacho at my school,” she said, delighted to have made the connection.
By the second week both children kissed their teachers hello without pause and offered a quiet, but firm, hola to anyone who greeted them. In other ways though their language development diverged.
Our daughter began singing songs made up of gibberish words, but with the cadence of Spanish. Then one day after a run of birthday parties in her classroom, she burst out singing, “Happy Birthday, feliz.” This was quickly followed by the song about ducks and requests for besos. This week, I realized that our daughter can now count higher in Spanish than English. Yesterday, as we sat making a grocery list she insisted I write down panpanas. After some investigation it turned out she wanted manzanas. Language is still fairly new for her, which seems to make the transition from English to Spanish more fluid. The world is always providing new words, so maybe it’s not so surprising that this school is full of them.
Our son, more conscious of language and more aware of anticipated mistakes, has integrated fewer words and sounds. He still claims to understand nothing, still says he just watches the other children for clues, still says his teachers explain things in English. However, his teachers say they use only a handful of English words a day to help him understand; and he brings home stories that indicate he is understanding far more than he could glean from simply watching gestures. This week while skyping with a friend from home, he excitedly told her we had zanahoria muffins from the market. He couldn’t understand why she responded with only a blank stare.
Sometimes, often, almost always, I have an unrequitable urge to fast forward a year to see where our children are, how they speak, who they have become. Of course I can’t and it doesn’t really matter. For now, we are marveling at patos, holas, manzanas and zanahorias.
PaR Cooked 