May 18: 22,853 steps in Montevideo, Uruguay

Today was our first day in Montevideo, Uruguay. We took a van from the airport to our hostel, Che Lagarto. We dropped off our luggage and explored the surrounding blocks for a few hours before we all met up to walk down to the town square, which ended up being about a 45 minute walk from our hostel.

They live a much more chaotic lifestyle here in some ways, but in other ways they are more laid back. For example, the streets are full of people, dogs, vendors, speeding cars, etc. There aren’t many quiet streets. My eyes were constantly darting around being drawn from one thing to another. This isn’t the cleanest city, but I guess the constant bustle of people would make it difficult to keep up with. They eat at later time here too. We ate lunch around 3pm and didn’t eat dinner until 8:30pm. They also take siestas here, which is like nap time in the middle of the day, even if you are at work!

For lunch I had some dark chocolate gelato and an empanada with queso and something else. I also tried Ana’s suggestion of the drink media y media, which means half and half. It turned out to be a type of carbonated wine, made with half red grapes and half white grapes. It was very sweet, and reminded me a lot of moscato wine.

Everyone speaks Spanish here, and so far it seems like unless the people work at an established business, they most likely don’t speak English. The receptionist at the hostel and our dinner waiter spoke English, but the food we got at the small cafes or the street vendors scattered throughout the streets don’t speak English. I just ask them “hablas ingles?” (Do you speak English?) and most of the time they answered no, so we resorted to finger pointing at what we wanted and trying to make out basic words to communicate. The people here are extremely friendly, even with the language barrier. I think they appreciate that we are trying to speak their language, even it is unsuccessful. Uruguay as a country is supportive of tourism for their economy.

I did have one incident today where I was a complete ignorant tourist. I went to a public restroom (baño) and there was a woman sitting in a chair in there. Turns out she was a restroom attendant. She handed me toilet paper so I was like "ok cool gracias" and went on in to the restroom. I came out, washed my hands, and left without thinking anything of it. I guess in public restrooms it is common to have a restroom attendant as a way to provide someone a job, and you are supposed to tip them a few pesos. Oops! The currency here is roughly 25 pesos to 1 American dollar. It varies daily though.

For dinner we went to a pizza place called Pizza by the Meter (Like a foot long sandwich but pizza version and in meters). It had its own South American twist to it, but it was delicious.

After dinner we came back to the hostel and checked our mattresses for bed bugs per the suggestion of world traveler Kristi Pearson. Good thing we did because one girl found one underneath her pillow and another girl found one in her drawer. Bed bugs can be an issue if they get into your luggage and lay eggs because the only way to kill them is basically by dry cleaning all of your stuff to get the water hot enough. Shouldn’t be an issue now, but wasn’t the best way to start out our first night!

My feet are tired from walking 9.7 miles total today in my new hiking boots, but every day will get a little bit easier!