The Theatro Solis is a renovated landmark in Montevideo dedicated to the performing arts, fine arts, and community awareness of the arts.
It was restored completely in the 1950s and looks now like it did in the 1800s. When you walk inside you are greeted by ushers and today is good to visit because an English speaking tour is beginning and I am hustled along to join it. There is no charge and the two young ladies who take myself and a young man from New Zealand under their wings answer our most boring questions.
Located near Independence Square in Montevideo, in the shadow of the Artigas statue and mausoleum, this theater is not majestic. It looks to me like a Roman 7-11.
My tour begins in a reception area just outside the theater’s Presidential boxes that are reserved for the President, his wife, and important guests.
From the reception room, we are taken into the theater itself.
From the main theater we go next downstairs to a much smaller performing space suited to smaller kinds of performances. A trio comes on stage and sings for us, dances, and acts out a specialty skit.
I’m glad ,when we are done, to have had a chance to see a piece of Uruguay’s culture. Even the old rough pioneer American West had Shakespeare mixed with opera and can can girls. I can’t say I have arrived in Montevideo without seeing a few guide book places. Going to the Big Apple without going up in the Empire State building, for instance, would be a major faux pas.
Next time down to Montevideo, I’ll come back and take in a real play here.
I bet there is gum stuck under the theater seats, and my guess is that it wasn’t put there only by kids.
The bus ride from Punta Del Este back to Montevideo takes three hours and ends at the Three Crosses Terminal.
Downstairs, bus companies, representing large and small bus lines that cover all routes in Uruguay, are selling tickets and loading luggage and passengers.
Upstairs, there is a mall with shopping, places to eat, and entertainment. At a place where people from all over the country come and go and have time and money, what better place to put a mall?
Christmas is here and instead of Santa’s elves, we have cute little cows.
Riding the bus is how i most often get around in foreign countries. The bus service in Uruguay is well run, not expensive, and connects you to all towns and cities of note whenever you have to go.
From Three Crosses, I am headed for Salto, a city famous for hot mineral springs and the perfect travel doctor’s prescription for a weary traveler.
Warming up in hot mineral baths is something even the ancient Romans did after a long year of subjugating and taxing their neighbors.
We have hot mineral baths in New Mexico, too.
These have to be better because I had to come so far to get here.
Rocha was my original goal.
My bus gets to Rocha and within a few minutes I am wondering why I bothered to make the trip?
Sometimes you get to a point where you get stuck and the best thing to do is go to a restaurant, have a drink, and evaluate. So, I go into a place called the “Americano Grill”. At the grill, my waitress finds a customer who speaks English and he tells me how to get to La Paloma. I have to return to the main square and catch a bus there because it is twenty miles to La Paloma, too far too walk even on a good day.
La Paloma, when I arrive, is another sleepy laid back surfing village, reminding me of Piriapolis without the Argentine Hotel and lion statues.
Locals here are getting prepared for their tourist season. School kids, at recess in the schoolyard, look studious in their white lab coats, with black bows, and school bells call them back to classes as I walk by on my way to the beach.The kids remind me of my school days, on the playground and standing in front of classes with chalk on my fingers.
A dog in the middle of the road, nonchalant, too smart to take a nap there, but not in a hurry to move, captures the mood of this little burg.
La Paloma, in baseball terminology, turns a strike out into a double off the center field wall.
After an afternoon of walking and picture taking, I catch the last bus from La Paloma back to Rocha, then catch the last bus out of Rocha back to Punta De Este. I get home in the dark, walking four blocks from the bus station to the hotel.
Countries are a lot like people – they often keep their best features hidden till you get to know them better.
This isn’t the first time on the road that an original plan has had to be scuttled and a new plan improvised.
I expect that damn dog is still in the middle of the street.
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.
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.
The influence of the Catholic church is everywhere in South America.
There is a church near most squares and church bells can be seen and heard from most anywhere in most cities,towns or villages. Huge wooden doors open in the morning and stay open until dark. People come and go, take off their hats, kneel in the pews, say prayers for themselves and people they don’t know.
The normal thing I do when I travel is not to look in guide books before I leave the house. My norm is to start walking, discover,then research. Chance creates the possibility for surprise , and, when I strike out without a destination in mind, I find things of interest that aren’t in the guide books.
It is quite by chance that I find the Cathedral San Fernando in Maldonado.
Turning a corner, I have to say this church is the most renovated and pristine church I have seen in Uruguay. The pinkish color of these exterior walls stands in contrast to the blue sky, and the statue holding the cross at the top of the building looking down at me, as I come closer, has the same effect on me that statues of Zeus had for the Greeks. The cathedral, I learn inside, has an interesting history.
It was begun in 1801 and inaugurated in 1895 by a local man – Montevideo archbishop Mariano Soler, who was born in nearby San Carlos.
The Cathedral features the Virgin Del Carmen salvaged from a sunken ship off the nearby Isla de Lobos in 1829. It also has a dying Christ figure inside that washed ashore from unknown sources and found a home here.
The interior of the church gives a sense of what churches should convey – how small we are and how big the world is,how this universe was created by something much greater than us. As guests, in someone else’s house – we shouldn’t dirty the linens.
I sit in a pew and listen to silence.
I leave feeling better, and worse.
The beach at Piriapolis is paralleled by a walkway for pedestrians and sightseers, as well as locals taking a lunch break in their vehicles with the doors open to give the breezes a better chance to cool them.
A point of interest on the Rambla is a long row of white lion statues. They look out of place, at first, but they grow on me.There are not many new statues being built these days. Stalin and Mao had their pictures on schoolroom walls, but, these days, statues speak of antiquity and people seem far too eager to tear down their old history.
On the waterfront by the beach stands the huge Argentine Hotel that dates back decades.
On a trip inside to reconnoiter the hotel casino, and use the rest room, I am greeted by a great swimming pool, immense dining halls, hundreds of rooms on multiple floors. Reviews on Trip Adviser are mixed. Some say the hotel is old, moldy, and smells. Others say it is a nostalgic trip back to the early part of last century. Some say the rooms aren’t clean. Others say the staff is attentive. After perusing a few dozen reviews, the accepted three star rating seems to be the opinion held by the majority. I like to remember that I can have a great time in a place no one likes, and be bored to death in a place everyone loves.
Piriapolis is an older, more genteel version of Punta Del Este – a seaside resort town waiting for Christmas visitors to make it bloom again, as it used too.
It appears to be a destination for middle class travelers on a middle class budget.
These days, it is hard too say, we are too enlightened for statues of lions and old hotels.
We would rather wear our culture on our T shirts and use our cell phones.
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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