The Temple of Music belongs in a different time and place.
This edifice is in a downtown San Jose, Costa Rica city park where music is performed and people congregate. This afternoon there is a group of young gymnasts practicing handstands under the temple dome, entertaining those who are passing through.
A young man with tattoos seems to be the leader, and, while I am watching, he is instructing another young man who is practicing handstands with wooden blocks set on the ground directly in front of him.
While doing a handstand, the student lifts his right hand off the right block and supports himself with his left hand. Then, he drops his right hand back to the right block, supports himself, and lifts his left hand in the air, off the left block.
It takes practice to learn to stand on one hand.
Passersby take pictures and one girl says she only wishes she could do half the things these gymnasts are practicing.
Pigeons, roosting on the outside edge of the dome, an upside down bowl, are nonchalant.
They don’t have to work on their balance and keep people below them on their toes.
This coffee is cheap, but not the best.
You buy a dollar token at the hotel reception desk, drop the token in the coffee machine’s slot, slide your cup in position, choose your poison, push a button, and wait as a small drizzle of coffee fills your paper cup almost to the top. The machine knows when to cut off so coffee doesn’t go on the floor.
Things introduce themselves all the time. You go about your business, not thinking about much, or looking for anything, and then something comes your way like a present arranged by a benevolent cosmic force that knows you will be delighted. This bold colored sign by the coffee machine is such a present.
” Drink Coffee,” the sign exclaims, “you can sleep when you’re dead.”
While we are waiting for our expiration date, coffee makes the waiting tolerable.
This sign takes me back to the fifties when even the thought of traveling to Uruguay was no where in my mind. Uruguay was just a country on old stamps in my dad’s collection in a box in the garage.
When you sleep in your childhood crib, you don’t have a clue where fate and your feet will take you.
If i had known where I was going, when i was in school, I would have paid more attention.
On a Montevideo city bus headed back to Ciudad Vieja, Christmas decorations catch my eye. I take a detour off the city bus to enjoy them closer.
This Plaza is not far from Independence Plaza. Today, there are spectators lounging on park benches, not in any hurry to move down to Independence Plaza and face the huge imposing statue of General Artigas surrounded by government offices and fancy hotels.
This little intimate plaza belongs in Alice in Wonderland.
There is a funny looking Christmas tree that is so perfect it is not perfect. There are three pink flamingos in a pond that has nothing to do with Christmas but adds the right color. There is a balloon astronaut five feet above the ground. There is an airplane and little butterflies. A fountain that was dormant has been filled with water for the Holiday Season.
The most satisfying Christmas depiction I witness is three wise men on camels. There are some who doubt there is even one wise man in this world, but, that is too harsh. There may be as many as ten.
I sit on a bench like the others this morning and wait patiently for the wise men to say something profound.
They don’t say a word, and that, to me, is as profound a statement as you can not make.
Many accommodations I have stayed in here have had a bidet. You see them in other countries, but I never remember seeing as many as there are in Uruguay.
There have been issues.
In bathrooms, bidets occupy the spot closest to the shower. The toilet is shoved in a corner so when you open the door to enter or leave the bathroom the door gets in the way of you getting to the toilet. The bidet is not something I use so its position of authority in the bathroom is questionable.
In the Ramon Massini Suites in Pocitos, I take a moment to see how one of these contraptions works. Unthinking, I pull up a little handle and get a geyser shot of water spray into my chest.
After my experience with the bidet, I resolve to leave them alone.
Now, I enter the bathroom, close the door, sit on my throne with as much dignity as I can compose.
When you see bidets and realize that half the humans in the world are significantly different from you, it gives a new meaning to the words ” foreign relations.”
Saturdays start slow in Salto. Even hound dogs sleep in this morning, worn out from chasing girls all night.
On the Rio Uruguay, small boat Captains are pushing their fishing boats hard, taking two, three, four paying customers further up the river where dorado’s are waiting to be reeled in at ” La Zona” where fishing is excellent and many travelers like to go in their quest of trophy fish.
On the pier this morning, early, there is a photo shoot in progress with three young girls dancing, modeling swimsuits, posing for sexy photos and getting direction from an old, bald impressario wearing sunglasses. When the teens change costumes a matronly attendant holds up a coat for them that becomes their changing room.
Clowning around, their big boss balances on the back of one of the benches on the pier and dances while a film crew snaps shots and gives him appreciation.
The girls love it.
I don’t know what they are trying to sell so early in the day, but youth and sex sells most anything anytime.
Behind news, business and politics is always old men with lots of money and lots of connections.
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As in Montevideo, there are antiquated homes in Salto too.
This old casa, on a street off the main thoroughfare, is one that needs more care than it will ever get. While it waits for someone with a dream to fall in love with it, it is a garden shop – El Nuevo Vivero. Inside, plants and trees for sale are placed in empty rooms and since there is no roof on much of the building, rain waters them right where they stand.
The sign in front says the business is open on Saturdays and Mondays. This morning the front door is open and someone rustles inside. It is Wednesday.
A young man comes to the front door to see what I want and invites me to come inside to look at his business even though he is closed officially.
Guillermo is having mate first thing this morning and shows me some of his plants. He is wearing a Brazil soccer shirt and we laugh about that. People take soccer serious on this continent. How can you be a good Uruguay citizen and not wear a Uruguayan soccer shirt?
In the U.S., this place would be closed for code violations. Here, there is no harm, thus no foul.
When I leave the nursery, the ” Closed ” sign, in the front door, still hasn’t been replaced.
A business, it seems to me, that won’t open its doors for a customer, even when the closed sign is in their window, isn’t much of a business.
Guillermo, owner and caretaker of El Nuevo Vivero, has his finger on the pulses of both plants, and business.
Marijuana is legal in Uruguay.
You don’t see much of it on the streets. A few surfers under palm trees indulge themselves, the pungent smell immediately detectable. You see tourists enjoying the herb in public, flaunting authorities. However, the real national addiction here is Mate, a natural tea.
Juan Carlos owns the Hotel Playa Brava in Punta Del Este. This afternoon he is talking with a hotel guest and I snap a quick picture of him and his Mate. You can’t visit this country without seeing citizens walking while holding a strange shaped little pot filled with green tea, a long curved silver spoon through which they sip the tea, and a thermos of hot water with which they fill their pot throughout the day.
Juan explains that the tea has a calming effect if you drink it all day and it is used in this entire region. Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay all have their distinctive brand and one country wouldn’t be caught drinking the tea of another country.
Juan Carlos enjoys his Mate.
Marijuana gets all the attention. But here, Mate is the drug of choice.
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.
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.
This day is spent in a small town that offers beach, shopping, a boardwalk,surrounded by hills and wooded areas, somewhat off well trod tourist tracks.
To get here we pull off Route 1 out of Punta Del Este and cut through gorgeous hills and grasslands with cows, fields of yellow flowers, a few white puffs of clouds on an otherwise blue sky tablecloth, small farm homes set back from the road.
Piriapolis is a destination where you can relax and put away pretensions.
There are peculiar houses in Piriapolis. There are homes with thatched roofs, sculptured walls, A frames, California bungalows, ranch homes, and even hippie hangouts with VW buses in the drive. One lady has a black winding staircase in her front yard that lets her go up to her roof to hang her clothes out to dry.
Dogs greet me as I walk through their neighborhoods and only half of the hounds are energetic enough to bark.
It is comfortable here,a hint of California in the middle of Dorothy’s Kansas.
I look for Toto and spot him asleep on a cushion in a front porch rocking chair. His head leans against a small pillow and a blanket knitted just for the length of his body lets me know that he is loved.
Piriapolis is a good shoe for the person it fits.
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