You have heard about Nirvana.
Imagine my surprise when our tour bus pulls into the Hotel Nirvana driveway just outside Colonia Swiss in Uruguay. It is exactly what I have imagined Nirvana to be like, except we aren’t in the clouds.
We have stopped for a twenty minute break for rest room facilities and a cup of coffee or tea, and treats, which we don’t have to pay for because the cost is included in our tour ticket.
The Nirvana Resort and Spa seems to have those things that people with time and money like – a pool, a driving range, a spa, fine dining, rooms that are clean and cleaned by someone else.
The huge white structure doesn’t exactly look Swiss but is likely modeled after some famous European get away. The grounds are immaculate and reminds that people with money want things to look just as nice where they go as where they are from.
Everything here is watered, raked, manicured. The staff wears black pants and white shirts or black skirts and white blouses. The girl who patiently serves us hot chocolate must have made a million but chats amiably while she fixes another.
After twenty minutes we hustle back to our bus, heads counted to make sure we aren’t leaving anyone behind, and we push on to Colonia Del Sacramento, the crown jewel of this journey.
It is sad to leave Nirvana, but paradise is not cut out for all of us.
The lighthouse on the tip of the peninsula offers the best view of the town .It is one of the sights I came to see by joining a tour group at a local Montevideo hotel.
The lighthouse stairs are almost straight up and a two hundred and fifty pound man has trouble getting all the way to the top because of the narrowness of the spiraling passage. You keep winding up and up and up, holding to a thick piece of insulated wire threaded through eye bolts anchored in the lighthouse’s interior concrete walls.
At the first landing, you can get out onto a deck and walk around the perimeter of the lighthouse, but I keep moving to where stairs end and the dormant cyclops light sleeps this morning.
There is a 360 degree view of Colonia Del Sacramento with a different vista through each of the windows of the lighthouse.
There is a harbor on one side of the light. Fishing boats are moored there and a long wooden pier juts out into the waters of the Rio Plata river.
Another view from the lighthouse is the city of Colonia Del Sacramento This old city was founded in the late 1600’s by the Portuguese and they and the Spanish fought for several hundred years to see who would control the area and its waters. There is, according to Pat, a World War 2 German ship sunk in the harbor by a Captain who didn’t want to surrender his ship.
It must look like this from the crows nest on pirate ships where a half rum addled pirate with a knife in his belt scanned the seas for big fat merchant ships carrying gold. It had to have been a hard dangerous life to risk yourself for uncertain wages, a bottle of rum and a civilization that only had a curse and hangman’s noose for you when your feet touched dry land.
Our tour operators give us a few hours before we head back to Montevideo, so I go back down the stairway, much faster than I ascended.
This is a World Heritage city that lives up to its press.
There are still sun drenched places in this world untouched by terror and conflict, places where the past and present hold hands and dance into their future.
Colonia Del Sacramento is a place where the best of Europe and Latin America got married and are happy as a bride and groom cutting cake and sipping champagne.
When you travel it takes half a day to do what you do at home in thirty minutes.
At home you drive to Best Buy to get your electronics, order your stuff on line and it is shipped to you at half the price in a couple of days.
When you travel you go forth on buying missions and aren’t sure whether you are going to find what you need. You know that in a big city like Montevideo, where everyone is playing with gadgets, there must be shops selling accessories. You just don’t exactly know where they are and whether you can communicate what you need.
I take the old battery out of my language translator so they can give me the same thing new. My screen protector is still on my phone but its edges are frayed and it falls off every time the phone comes in or out of my right pants pocket.
This electronics shop is on Sarandi Street before Constitution Plaza. It doesn’t have huge window displays and you have to be buzzed in through the front doors by a guy working the counter. Inside, I show him my dead battery and he finds a replacement. He has the screen protector too.
Buzzed out of the store, I take a moment to get its location into my memory.
When in Uruguay, you do it the way Uruguayans do.
This store has a humble exterior but inside they had what I needed, when I needed it.
Finding stuff I need in a new place is gratifying, but it is the stuff I need that I can’t buy that causes me the most heartbreak.
On Sarandi Street are groups of people, dressed to the nines, standing in my way as I pass on a sidewalk past a woman’s fashion store,
Happy couples exit a bland doorway, into the sunlight. They are jubilant.
When more smiling couples come out and take photos, throw rice, hug and toss flowers to the next lucky man or woman, it is certain this extravaganza is about marriage, a traditional and good institution, if there ever was one.
A closer look at a little bland sign on the bland building confirms that this office, next to an upscale clothes retailer, is the City’s Office of Matrimony
As brides and grooms pose outside for their wedding pictures, some with professional photographers, others with friends or family who have phones or fancy cameras, some couples do dramatic hugs and kisses. Others are subdued.
On this occasion it would be a sacrilege to remark that not all of these newly joined couples will be together in five years.
The search to find someone who will live with you, for better and worse, is worth the effort no matter how it ends.
The next historical development in weddings will be to get married at a drive up window, in street clothes, with a cooler of beer in the trunk and passes to the opera in the glove compartment.
Most marriages begin happy but their success rate is still only fifty percent, regardless of who marries you, where you get married, how much money you have, what God you worship.
Odds, as Las Vegas knows, are hard to beat, but odds don’t stop people from getting married.
This grocery is a find – the Frog Maxishop. It is on the Peatonal Perez Castellano, a pedestrian walkway that connects the Montevideo port on one end and the Montevideo Rambla on the other. When cruise ships are in port, it is on this street that most cruisers shop.
Doing little cooking, it has become my custom to browse the neighborhood Frog for microwave meals and deli items. More discriminating diners eat steaks in the Mercado, or the Parrillada Bar and Restaurant where locals watch soccer games on a small flat screen TV, mounted on a wood shelf in a corner, near the ceiling, secured with a bungee cord.
This afternoon the Frog’s lunch special is Pollo a la Portuguese dishes that are pre-cooked and only need to be warmed before enjoying. The dish comes with rice and veggies and chicken, a nutritious meal.
It is busy in the grocery this morning and many in the neighborhood walk here to shop. Turistas, as well as locals, browse the aisles, price checking and reading labels.
I take a couple of the dishes home with a six pack of bottled water.
Shopping beats cooking, any day, and finding what I need, this easy, is a major coup.
Shopping local makes the city start to feel like a home away from home.
Walking the streets of the port district, you find hotels you might have stayed if you hadn’t rented a studio. It is human to comparison shop, wonder what that place or this place has to offer at what price.
The two hotels within a block and a half of my studio are the Don Botique Hotel and the AK Design hotel.
According to TripAdvisor, both establishments are clean, safe, well rated, offer free internet. The Don offers a regular breakfast while the AK has a Continental breakfast. Both places get good marks and both hotels have websites with visitor reviews. For the time I have been here, moving into high season, the price for a room for one adult for one night at the Don is $168.00 U.S. A night at the AK is $70.00 U.S. My studio is less than $30.00 U.S. per night.
When I throw open shutters and walk out onto my little balcony, I can see the Don.
For price,privacy, quiet, and flexibility, I like the view better from where I am standing.
Turning a corner off Colon street, near Roberto’s antique store and studio, I happen upon a sleeping man in an alcove. He is out of the way of pedestrian traffic, looks comfortable, isn’t causing trouble. There are no wine bottles. There is no cart packed with clothes and bags of groceries to show he has been on the street a long time. His clothes aren’t pressed but they aren’t dirty.
His chest moves as he breathes.
There are similarities between sleep and dying. One you wake from, the other you don’t. One is temporary and the other is permanent.
I debate taking his photo. If an awake person doesn’t want their photo taken they can shake their finger or say no. He has no say in his present condition.
If you snooze, you lose.
Being able to sleep on the street in board daylight, in the middle of a big city, shows a level of trust I don’t have.
Surrounded by dogs, all on leashes, this long hair consults his map.
It isn’t certain whether this group is going on a field trip, going to relieve themselves, headed for a romp on the beach, or just following their leader, who holds their leashes. They are stopped and the dog walker takes out a plastic bag and picks up a present left by one of his charges. It is certain he is the only one doing this nasty chore in this port district because you find dog presents on most streets and are surprised there aren’t more.
The sun is going down and it would be unexpected that all these dogs belong to this young man. Whether they have to be registered and need checkups and shots is an unknown but a vet supply place is near so there is a need here that someone is making a living catering to.
Putting his map away, the dog whisperer clutches all the leases in one hand and strides away, a pied piper.
Animals love their people.
This pack knows who their lead dog is even if they don’t know where he is taking them, and don’t care.
What I’m asking is – why would you have a dog if you don’t want to take it for a walk?
Tango began in the early 1900’s in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Beginning in brothels, like American jazz, it was refined and adopted by middle and upper classes, cleaned up and turned into a respectable music and dance form.
Dance competitions usually contain the tango, a sensual dance with complicated movements and hypnotic music.
In front of one of the cafes near my studio, there is a demonstration of tango with a lady who is much older than her partner. She is dressed in black with net stockings and clipped black hair. The couple move over rough tiles as music plays loudly from a little black speaker.The traditional tango is played by an orchestra that has a piano, two accordions, two violins and a double bass. This recorded music is just violins.
For an entire song, we in the audience watch the pair move in ever widening, and then contracting, circles in front of the restaurant. She makes most of the movements, dipping her shoulder, lifting her knees, tossing back her head, letting the young man lead.
The themes of Tango are unrequited love, betrayal, the passage of time, and death.
A famous local poet, Enrique Discepolo, called tango “the sad thought that is danced.”
Tango came from poor neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and Montevideo where money runs short and emotions run high.
Cutting edge art flows from those who live closest to their emotions and have empty wallets.
There are plenty of dogs in this city, but thousands of cats too.
Cats don’t make a lot of noise, take up a lot of space, or make crazy demands. They live as they have for thousands of years – hunting, sleeping, making reproductions of themselves, adapting to human civilization for which they have no interest or care.
Walking the area around Independence Square, close to an area called The Centro, this gato catches my eye.
He is stretched out on a window ledge with bars on one side of him and closed windows on the other. It is certain he is asleep and his owner has closed windows before leaving the house. When this guy wakes and sees he is trapped he will just turn over and go back to sleep. For this moment he is in cat dreamland where cats have all the mice they want and are always successful in the hunt.
In the city, dogs and cats live with humans and have adapted. Now, dogs don’t do much hunting. But cats, when push comes to shove, can become fearsome predators. Whether they love the little tuna bits their owners spoon out of a can into a little dish for them is likely. Whether they like a fat mouse or a big bird is more than likely.
I don’t know where this big boy was all night, but this morning he isn’t going anywhere. When his owners return they will open the window. He will jump down and brush against their legs.
They will laugh and pet him and let him out into a little back yard in the middle of a big big city where he will wait in a corner for something flying, creeping, or crawling to come close enough, so he can appropriate it.
Recent Comments