Uruguay

Dear Readers:

It is so nice to be on land where the Internet connection works quickly.  Thanks again to all of you who responded to Issue #3 of this trip.  Those of you who do not respond to at least one issue will be dropped from the subscription list at the end of this trip.  I’m assuming you have no interest in reading this blog.  If that is an incorrect assumption, please let me know.

While the cruise is over, our trip is not and this blog will cover Uruguay which we were in several days ago.  The ship made 2 stops in Uruguay — Punta Del Este and Montevideo.  We both enjoyed Uruguay a lot; in fact, we liked it more than Chile.

Punta Del Este is a prestigious, upscale seaside resort.  The Atlantic Ocean meets the Rio Plata (Silver River) here.  (As an aside, Mark Zuckerberg vacationed here in early January and apparently there was a FaceBook malfunction while he was there.  Doug:  were you aware of the problem?)

We went on an excursion from the ship that took us to several places.  First we were driven around Punte Del Este.  On the beach here there is a huge sculpture of a hand.  Here is one of fingers:

From here we were taken to 2 museums.  Marty was never so happy to visit a museum before!  The first museum was the Ralli Museum of Contemporary Art.  The art was mostly by South American artists but there were also some sculptures by Salvador Dali.  There was a terrific sculpture garden.  Here’s one of the sculptures in the garden:

And here’s a sculpture by Salvador Dali which clearly incorporates aspects of his most famous painting: 
The Persistance of Memory:

Next we were taken to Casapueblo which is the home and atelier (studio) of Carlos Paez Vilaro–an artist who built this weirdly shaped house.  It resembles Spanish-Moroccan architecture and is situated on a rocky bluff overlooking the Atlantic.  There are narrow steps leading to a maze of rooms scattered on different levels and filled with the artist’s works.  I liked the house itself;  I wasn’t too impressed with his art.

After the excursion we were able to walk around by ourselves in town.  As previously mentioned, we much prefer to “do our own thing”.

The following day the ship docked in Montevideo where we went on a Jewish Heritage Tour.  (Ruth:  thanks for the article; we had the same tour guide you had and I gave her the article so she could see herself in print.)  Uruguay is a very small country; only 3.3 million people in the entire country and 1.4 million of them live in the capital (Montevideo).  There are 18,000 Jews of which 16,000 live in Montevideo.  Apparently there were many more in the 1950’s but many have since emigrated to Israel.  During WW II Uruguay had an open door policy and many Jews escaping from the Nazis wound up here. 

The tour included a Holocaust Memorial.  Part of the memorial has a wall (a la Jerusalem) with a big break in the middle symbolizing the “break” in the population of Jews.  The photo doesn’t show the break.

The excursion took us to Positos (which is the primary Jewish community), to 2 synagogues, a Hebrew school and a community center.  We were told that 400 attend Friday night services at one of the synagogues. Here’s a menorah that was in one of the shuls:

We were scheduled to go on a second excursion that day to a winery but it got cancelled due to lack of interest.  There was another winery tour that included lunch but we couldn’t go on that one since we wouldn’t have been back in time from the morning tour.  Marty was initially disappointed since we had never had any wine from Uruguay but he was happy that we had an opportunity to walk around Montevideo by ourselves.

We walked through the Old City (quite small), went to a market, a museum dedicated to Carnival (guess you can make a museum for every niche; just like magazines!) and then to all the plazas in town, etc.  On the way, we passed a walking tour from the ship and bumped into a couple we had met on another excursion.  The guy seemed a little envious that we were walking around by ourselves!  Here’s a mask from the Carnival Museum:

So that covers our time in Uruguay.  The following day we docked in Buenos Aires but didn’t need to depart the ship until the next day.  We went on a full day trip to Iguazu Falls.  I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Much love,
Irene