Greeting from Chile and welcome to our extremely belated first blog post! We just spent our first week eight weeks in South America, one of them being in Montevideo where we had a grand ole time. After a casual 24 hours of travel, which included 4 glorious hours at the Chilli’s in the Fort Lauderdale airport, we were happy to arrive in Montevideo. Unfortunately the doorman at our Airbnb initially said he did not have the keys to our apartment, but after calling everyone we could, he figured out that he did indeed have the keys and they just weren’t labeled. Our doorman also appeared confused as to why we were visiting Uruguay and asked us who tricked us into coming to Montevideo (always a good sign).
Our Airbnb was in the neighborhood of Palermo/Barrio Sur, which is a nice neighborhood a few blocks from the water and La Rambla (the waterfront promenade) and about a 25 minute walk from Ciudad Vieja, the main tourist area. La Rambla was definitely one of our favorite parts of the city and we made a point of going for a walk along La Rambla pretty much every evening around sunset.
Enjoying the view from our Airbnb 
On our first night we walked to a neighborhood called Punta Carretas and were surprised to find that the restaurants we initially wanted to eat at were packed, even on a Wednesday night. We ultimately waited and had a nice introductory meat dinner at a place called La Perdiz. Our second night was one of the highlights of our trip. We went to a place in Ciudad Vieja called Primuseum, which is a museum of kerosene lamps (who knew??) as well as a wonderful restaurant. We had a delicious 6 course meal and enjoyed an incredible tango music show, all in a delightfully personal setting with only 3 other groups of people. While we loved everything about Primuseum (we’re very into kerosene lamps now), we were surprised that Ciudad Vieja was fairly dead at night (even though we had been told that this was the main hot spot and tourist area).
On Friday evening we went for a nice walk back around Ciudad Vieja, which was much more lively during the day. We saw some of the main historical sites, including Palacio Salvo, Plaza de Independencia (the main square), and historic Teatro Solis (more below about this). Over the weekend we lucked out with great weather and spent Saturday eating brunch outside at a nice French cafe called Cafe Gourmand, exploring the Parque Rodo neighborhood (including a free visual arts museum), and going to Bouza Bodega, a beautiful winery about 20-30min outside of the main city center.
On Sunday we did extreme sightseeing (aka we walked a lot and saw a lot). We started the day by walking about 1.5 hours to the Blanes Museum, which is a small museum housed in an old villa. The museum was pretty cool but the setting was definitely the highlight. There was also a very nice Japanese garden behind the museum that we enjoyed quite a bit. We briefly walked over to the botanical gardens but it seemed to be just an average park rather than the flora-filled botanical gardens of our dreams. Tired from our long walk, we then took a cab to Ciudad Vieja, had a brief meat snack at Mercado del Puerto (a bustling food market in an old train station), and valiantly purchased tickets to a tango show at Teatro Solis for the following night. We walked back to our neighborhood just in time to catch Candombe, which is a big and festive parade of dancing, drumming, and large flag waving that happens every weekend. We were lucky enough to find a spot on an elevated stage which afforded us a great view of the different dance groups and of a group of children trying to push each other off of the aforementioned stage.
The following evening we had our last night out in Montevideo. We went to the historic Cafe Brasilero, a cool old cafe from 1877, and then went to Teatro Solis for the International Tango Festival. Teatro Solis is an incredibly ornate theater that opened in 1856 and is filled with small theater boxes. We were magically able to get two seats in the middle of the 12th row of the orchestra for $28 total, which was a nice “this would never happen in New York” experience. We both enjoyed about an hour of the tango show before we were ready to leave, but unfortunately the show was scheduled to be nearly three hours long without an intermission. We shamefully committed a major international faux pas and left in the middle of the show, which was more challenging than we expected and involved squeezing between people’s legs and the row in front of us (perhaps the architects in 1856 did not plan for our 2018 escape).
Overall we had a very lovely time in Montevideo and thought it was an interesting city, but neither of us are quite sure we would recommend someone go out of their way to go there. There were limited food options besides pizza, sandwiches, and meat, and it was more expensive than we had expected. However, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that there was an 18% discount on many things (like restaurant bills) if you paid with a foreign credit card in an effort to promote tourism. Even with this promotion, we were surprised by how not touristy Montevideo was (and we were already expecting it to be less touristy than some of our other destinations). Every time we went to what we thought would be a major tourist destination, we were surprised that there did not seem to be many tourists. There were even fewer English-speaking tourists, and many of the tourists we did encounter were from places like Argentina and Brazil. In general there were not many people who spoke to us in English throughout our week, which was a good intro to South America and nice practice. From our brief experience in Montevideo (and some additional research as well), it seems that Montevideo (and Uruguay) is one of the more liberal countries in South America. Gay marriage is legal, and many places advertised with rainbow flags that they were welcoming to the LGBTQ community. Marijuana is also legal, but only for residents of Uruguay. In general, everyone was also extremely friendly and hospitable to us.
On that note, we will say adios and apologize for procrastinating setting up this blog. We will post soon about our time in Buenos Aires!
EXTRA SPICY BONUS PICS
I’m happy to find you posting your travelogue on line, makes me feel happy to see the sights from my comfortable home!
Thanks! Glad you’re enjoying it. We’ll have some more posts coming up soon.
Wow! This is a blog worth waiting for. Thanks for all the detail. Fascinating. In between all this eating I guess you both worked some. Mention that occasionally to keep us from total jealousy.