There is a Beverly Hills of Punta Del Este, Uruguay.
They call it a barrio, like other barrios, but, the houses are immense, the yards larger, the privacy maintained, and no clunkers are allowed on the streets.
The Beverly Hills barrio of Punta Del Este is located on Los Arrayanes calle and is in rolling and wooded land. The estates have wrought iron, brick, security gates, and three car garages. My taxi driver says there is money in Uruguay and much of it comes from Argentina and Brazil, two richer neighbors who like the peacefulness of Uruguay and the tolerance of its people.
The Ralli museum is one of five in the world built by Harry and Martine Recanati who love Latin American art and want to have a place to show it to people. There is no charge to enter their museum and you are free to enjoy the building, art, and exterior courtyards to your heart’s content.
There are works here by Salvatore Dali and Andrew Calder. There are also works by lesser known artists from Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico and Argentina.
Dali, in retrospect, is more grounded than I thought and his skills, in many mediums, are first rate.
Calder is a little too airy.
D’Souza doesn’t need an entire room.
Female artists have lots to say and are given too small a place to say it.
I wonder whether the folks that live in this Beverly Hills barrio walk to the gallery or have a chauffeur bring them?
Some of them, I would wager, have originals by these artists hanging in their grand rooms and come to openings here just for the free wine, cheese and crackers.
Punta Del Este is still a ghost town this time of year, in November.
This town by the ocean comes alive in December, January, February and March. Prices go up, locals rent out their homes for triple prices, hotels make enough in a few months to make it the rest of the year when weather is less sunny and people don’t want to go to the beach. I have been told April is a good time to visit too. You can see the town getting ready now for high season. A McDonald’s is opening and workmen are repairing broken tiles in sidewalks in front of shops.
Today,surfers,who wear black wet suits, patiently paddle out towards the bigger waves breaking further off shore.
Off Emir beach, there are as many as thirty surfers in the ocean. I follow their bobbing heads, black wet suits, arms and legs paddling towards shore as a good wave catches them from behind,prompting them to stand up on their surfboards and hold out their arms for balance, riding all the way to the beach if they are lucky.
There are sun lovers on Emir beach who spend most of the day face up/ face down on towels, lounge chairs, or just plain sand. They wear sunscreen and bake. They drink and eat, listen to music, visit with friends and family. But, always, they concentrate on getting darker.
Wall sitters, where I sit today, hang out and watch who is wiping out in the waves, watch bikinis, joke around, and move as slowly as possible.
The beach today is full of vacationing families who have come to enjoy the Christmas holiday season together with many more to show up here in the next few months.
People are drawn to the beach like iron particles being attracted by a huge magnet.
I am, I freely admit, one of these particles.
It would take a bigger magnet to remove me from my wall seat this morning because I don’t, at this precise moment, have any place I would rather be.
There must be as many real estate sales offices in Punta Del Este as there are places for sale and rent.
No one stays put these days and for all the places here that has someone living in them, you still have plenty of places that are empty. This is a real estate broker’s paradise. Customers come down, fall in love, buy a place, move here, then lose their love and bail out. You get to sell a place over and over and over and you have nothing of yours at stake.
The area is seductive. It is clean, has shopping, has the beach, is easy to get around, is safe. The fact that it is expensive and is a resort community that expands in the good months and shrinks to a skeleton staff in the winter is easy to forget..
If you buy a place here are you going to live in it full time?
How much use will you get out of it?
Who will watch it when you are not here?
Is renting it practical?
Are property values going to rise or fall in the next few years so you don’t lose your reason for investment?
What is the government going to do that will impact the value of your investment, the income you might make from it, or whether you can sell it or not?
Is it really any different here than in Fort Lauderdale or Padre Island or San Diego, California?
If you are in business how are you going to survive lean months.
Wherever I go, real estate is for sale and people are either buying, selling or trading..
As far as I know, Gerardo is the most honest man on the planet and can, for a price,he will find you the castle of your dreams.
My dad was a realtor so I know there are honest ones on the planet.
The need to own a home is not going away anytime soon.
On vacation, where it is warm and people lay on the beach, you forget about Christmas.
Christmas comes in December no matter where you are in the world. In this Punta Del Este shopping mall, Christmas has arrived, decorations are out, Santa has been puffed up, and all that is needed is more customers and a brisk buying season.
During Christmas season we set time aside to do nice things for people we may not be nice too other times. This is the time of year when bygones are to be bygones, when wrongs are forgiven, when giving and getting are almost on par,when open hearts overtake our baser instincts.
Santa waves when I see him.
Everyone knows there is a Santa Claus and he lives in a big house at the North Pole. He has been working all year to make presents for all those who have been nice, not naughty. Ramping up operations, his reindeer are rearing to go but he also uses Fed X, Amazon, UPS, the Post Office, and DPS to help him complete his mission. He has look alikes sit in shopping malls and let kids sit on their knees and tell what they would like for Christmas. Everyone knows Santa can’t be in all places at all times.
Weather doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas. Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Christ whether it is hot or cold, dry or wet, spring or winter.
It remains odd, however, that more people these days worship Santa than Christ.
Punta Ballena is ten to fifteen miles outside of Punta Del Este.
The bus lets you off by a worn out spot on the highway’s shoulder and the driver points you across the highway towards an uphill winding road overlooking the ocean.
This is my first visit here.
Before, on the bus ride from Montevideo to Punta Del Este, I saw this view and wondered what people did in Uruguay to be able to make the money needed to live here? The reality is that many who live here bring money with them.The rich have play places all over the world.
It is understandable that nearly all the land with a view of the water has been sold and has a house on it. Across the street, in beautiful wooded, open areas, are Se Vende signs with phone numbers. There isn’t a hundred yards difference between the two pieces of land, but view adds up to extra millions of dollars in value.
If you have money, you don’t want to walk across the street to see the ocean.
If you have money, you think about things like this.
These two lovebirds, by our standards on the cost of an ocean view, from their front porch, are richer than all of us. put together.
When you come towards the end of the winding road that leads you from the highway to the water, you look down and see a turnaround where buses and cars are parked and people are standing on stone walls taking snapshots of the ocean for their scrapbooks.
I am looking for a white pueblo styled house, ” Casa Pueblo” built somewhere on this peninsula.
Not seeing it, I backtrack and ask a lady with her daughter where the Casa Pueblo is? The woman points and moves her hand a little to the right, pointing over a hill I can’t see through.
I walk back down the winding road, go further than I had before, and spy a smaller road cutting away to the right from this main road. A few more steps and I see white adobe style walls that can only be the famous Casa Pueblo built on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
There are vehicles parked along both sides of the narrow road leading up to its entry and people are trekking towards the National Monument like ants following a jungle trail.
Casa Pueblo is home and studio of Carlos Paez Vilaro, Uruguay’s most famous artist.
Whereas art can be done quickly, building takes more time. There are engineering problems, aesthetic questions, debates about whether concrete and wood can do the things you are asking them to do. In New Mexico, as well as here, materials are touched by hands. Cement is mixed and poured by the wheelbarrow load. Walls are plastered with hand tools and left uneven and undulating.
Wandering up and down stairs through the home and studio and gift shop and hotel and museo, inside and out, there are unexpected turns and twists.
For the longest time it is very comfortable for me just to sit on the back observation deck and look at the water below me change colors. I can stand at the deck railing and look at hotel guests in bikinis trying to get brown when the sun is behind a cloud.
Men’s minds are not all made the same way but if my house was built to fit my mind’s interior it would look a lot like this.
Most of us have castles in our minds, but we just can’t afford to buy them, or build them.
Drawing is about lines.
You have straight lines, curved lines, and a combination of both. With line you begin reproducing what you see, then drawing what you imagine, then making something new that hasn’t been seen before. Something must have snapped as Carlos put pencil on paper, chalk on paper, paint on canvas, clay on the wheel, murals on big city walls around the world.
In his work you see Picasso and the influence of ancient cultures of South and Central America – the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans. You see the influence of African masks and Ancient Greek sculptures. Art fed him like a farmer eating from his own garden.
Some of the works in the gift shop are not to my taste, but that means little. There are many foods but you don’t have to like them all to make them good for someone.
Vilaro’s older works are surprisingly as inquisitive as the early ones since age seems to diminish chance taking and creativity.
I like it here. This place resonates like a ringing dinner bell as the sun goes down and candles are lit on white tablecloths.
Casa Pueblo is one of the must see sights in Uruguay.
The house is the art studio and home of one of Uruguay’s most famous artists – Carlos Paez Vilaro. His biography calls him an abstract artist, painter, potter, sculptor, muralist, writer, composer, and constructor. He was born in 1923 in Montevideo and started drawing in 1939 at the ripe old age of 19. From humble beginnings, he created his life, as he found his way to live it, with friends all over the world.
The Casa Pueblo is, in his own words, “His fight against straight lines.”
The home he made in Punta Ballena, in the 1950’s, then a very remote place in Uruguay, was later expanded to include a museum, gift shop, restaurant, gallery, and studio. On film, in a sitting room at the entry to the historical site, the artist tells of his early life, his travels around the world. Coming from poverty, he identified with struggles for independence and was involved in music and culture of the barrios. He made films and played music. He was a Renaissance Man.
These photos present him as a young man, and then an older man. One of his sons commented, at the time of his death, that “I hope he rests in peace. I’ve never seen a guy who works that much, and I mean it. He worked up until yesterday.”
On the film, the artist calls work his peace.
Give thanks to artists because they are explorers with candles who show us the way in the dark.
At the end of the day, photos are sifted and sorted, evaluated, approved, or deleted.
You take as many photos as possible on trips because you know not all things you shoot are going to work. It takes only a quick point, shoot, then you put the camera back into your pocket, as you walk.There is nothing complicated about snapping a photo.
Sometimes, you look at the camera roll and find something serendipitous. You either see something in a photo you didn’t see when you first shot it, or, you see a mistake that interests you. It wasn’t planned, but it tweaks interest. This photo is one of these second types.
This odd photo is of me and my shadow.
Sometimes I don’t know where my shadow is, but most bright days, when I turn, just so, Mr. Shadow is right with me.
There used to be an old vaudeville song called “Me and My Shadow.” The entertainer would strut across the stage, looking over his shoulder, trying to catch his shadow catching him. It was a catchy Tin Pan Alley song and a catchy show stopper. People loved it. The only reason I remember is the performer played clarinet, and I play clarinet.
The vaudeville entertainer was Ted Lewis. You can Google ” Me and My Shadow ” and catch his thing on You Tube.
A reviewer of the Ted Lewis clarinet playing called it, ” The last anguish of a dying dog. ”
He might have been too kind.
As man’s best friend, and women’s cuddle master, dogs are in Punta Del Este too.
I have seen no dog whisperers here as I did in Ciudad Vieja, but dogs go where their masters are. Dog lovers know that their dogs are worth buying a steak for, grilling it, and cutting it up in nice little bites for them, just the way they like it. There is just something special about having an associate that doesn’t question, doesn’t fight, doesn’t judge, and barks at the people you don’t like either.
This poodle is comfortable and doesn’t snap as I snap a quick picture. Self assured, she maintains her regal composure and gives me only the slightest notice. Up on her comfortable throne, she has a wide open view of the street below.
To be treated in the manner to which you are entitled is every dog’s mission in life, but the first rule, in any dog’s Bible, is get a good owner.
Once you have that you can fix your master the way you like them.
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