Drinking Mate in Montevideo

We traveled about 20 hours from Mexico to Houston to Panama City before finally landing in South America. I was overjoyed to step off the plane into the hot, sunny city of Montevideo, Uruguay. But, with a change in country comes another change in the Spanish accent. It took me about a week before I could actually hear the accent and understand. Ricardo and I have both been to Uruguay in the past at different times in our lives, so this wasn’t a surprise, but still something to get used to.

We stayed at a great Airbnb located between the Punta Carretas and Pocitos neighborhoods and we were only a 10-15 minute walk to the beach. We had grocery stores nearby and a bus stop around the corner when we wanted to travel into the Old City for museums and such. We kicked off our week with a personal tour from our family friend, Maria Noel. She was the most amazing host! She drove us clear across the city where we stopped at a museum, went inside the Cathedral, visited some other neighborhoods, and had tea time at a wonderful cafe on the beach. 

She gave us tons of tips, and this was how we planned our remaining days in Montevideo which consisted of:

Eating Chivitos. These are amazing and super healthy.

Eating Alfajores. These come in multiple varieties and as you can probably guess, they're also super healthy. My personal favorite is the dulce de leche filling (basically caramel) completely coated in chocolate.



Drinking Mate. Everywhere you go in Uruguay you’ll see someone carrying around their mate (pronounced mah-tay) and hot water thermos. And I mean everywhere! Ricardo picked up the habit while at our Airbnb.



Swimming. We spent many afternoons in the Rio de la Plata (River of Silver) because it was so hot. Yes, hot. Not snowing. Sorry Michiganders!



Getting Lucky in the Plaza Independencia. I was told to step through the Puerta de la Ciudadela (door to the old city) with my right foot for good luck in the coming years. Life is good and I can’t imagine being any luckier, but here we go…

 

Admiring Art. The Joaquín Torres-García museum is one of my favorites in Montevideo. We were a bit bummed this time because his famous América Invertida (inverted or upside down drawing of South America) was on loan to another museum.

Enjoying Carnaval! We were so lucky to have timed our visit just right to catch the opening parade of Carnaval. This parade happens once a year and it was incredible. It’s so long that we didn’t even stay for the whole thing. Carnaval lasts the month of February with different shows happening almost every night. 

Here are a couple of short video clips from a Tablado show we saw:

Montevideo is definitely on my list of places I’d love to live (maybe retire?) one day. :) We still have some destinations to plan - where would YOU love to visit or live?