One might think getting peanut butter in Uruguay is easy.
When your taste buds get the best of you though, it becomes a scavenger hunt to satisfy your suddenly craving taste buds.
The only place I have found peanut butter in Montevideo has been at the Frog, a small mini-grocery you find in small Montevideo neighborhoods where Americans hang out.You guess the Frog carries peanut butter because tourists want it, but I want to shake the purchasing agent’s hand, or give her a kiss, for having it on the shelf.
I know I am ready to go home when I am thinking of a salad bar, a great American hamburger, barbecue ribs, a plate of green enchiladas with salsa and chips, a Chinese buffet with General Tao’s chicken and great green beans.
The peanut butter jar goes into my suitcase to go to Costa Rica tomorrow.
I am especially looking forward to the fantastic breakfast buffet at the Hotel Aranjuez in San Jose.
Waking up to a fresh cup of Costa Rican coffee, a made to order omelet, fresh fruit and pastries you always
like, is long overdue.
I can’t move to a country that doesn’t feed me right, or have peanut butter in more than one grocery store..
Pocitos doesn’t awake until ten in the morning.
My first time past the little diner on the corner, a block from the beach, the sign in the window says Cerrado. Doubling back, Albierto is now in its place.
A plaque on the exterior says this establishment, in one form or another, has been open since 1910. A lot can go wrong in a century and surviving progress is not for sissies.
Seated, I do a leisurely check of my E-mails, send a couple of text messages.
My bill for a coffee and a small glass of water is seventy eight pesos. With a tip, the total is a hundred pesos, or somewhere south of five U.S. dollars. My bill is speared on a little nail, and, for a moment, seems to nail down Uruguay accurately.
What we all want is 1950’s prices to come back.
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.
Lunch is hours away but a foreman is already buying food for his troops before it rolls around
A sale unfolds as I stand on the sidewalk in front of a construction site and watch sandwiches and sweets go into a five gallon bucket. A stooped figure is retrieving orders from shelves in the back of a little van and the subs he pulls out look big to me.
“What you got in there? ”
The young man, bearded, points at two front rows of sub sandwiches, and a back row of desserts.
“Did you make them,” I ask?
“No, I have a supplier.”
“How much for the big subs?”
“In U.S. dollars, six.”
“What’s your name?”
“Edgardo.”
We shake and make a sandwich deal for tomorrow morning same time, same place since I didn’t bring any money on this stroll. He wants to give me a sandwich now and I pay tomorrow but I don’t want to do that because there is lots of static that can get between now and tomorrow. It is nice that he trusts me enough to make such an offer.
I don’t see a permit but I don’t need one because his business is popular, and, for that reason alone, advertises itself.
Helping local small business guys is high on my list of things to do, even when I’m traveling. .
When I work construction I eat out of concession trucks when they are close by at home.
I can’t make this sandwich for what he sell’s them for, and, even if I bought from his supplier, I’d have to walk there and convince them to sell to me.
Paying people for their time and money is never a bad idea.
I appreciate being paid for my knowledge, skills, and service too.
This young man cleans shellfish he harvested earlier this morning.
The shellfish are on the bottom of the bay and he uses a net to bring them up, a net weighted heavy that he casts out by hand, lets sink to the bottom, then wrestles up and into his small boat with shellfish captured in it.
He cleans his catch in a homemade sifter made from two by fours with a screen mesh nailed to the underside. On the concrete steps this morning he pours sea water over his catch and moves shells around in the bottom of the sifter with his hand to make mud stuck to the shellfish dissolve. It takes him three different pours before he scoops clean shells out of his sifter and puts them into a five gallon plastic paint bucket to sell to his customers.
While he works, seals swim to the edge of the walkway and bark. They are begging, but getting no response, from either of us, they take a breath of air and disappear back into their murky water.
There are plenty of steps one has to go through to get shellfish from the sea onto your plate.
These shell fish will end up on a local restaurant menu, part of a lunch special for visitors wearing diamond earrings and Rolex watches.
For some people, time and money mean the same thing and you don’t want to waste either.
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.
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.
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.
There isn’t anything new about pizza.You find it all around the world. What is refreshing about this pizza is that it is made outdoors, you watch the guys prepare it, the ingredients are natural, the taste is great, the price is a bargain.
“What would you like,” my personal chef asks?
I spot a toaster oven with a miniature tomato and cheese pizza on its top cooling. On a linen tablecloth, on the folding table in front of me, are bowls with fresh cut ingredients. There are chili’s, peppers, tomatoes, ham, onions. lettuce, cheese, and other typical choices.
“What are you making, ” I ask?
“We are making you a special pizza,” the young man dressed in black says, “you pick your toppings.”
“How much?”
“60 pesos.”
That is about three U.S. dollars which sounds pricey but yesterday a pollo sandwich with bacon cost six dollars U.S. at McDonald’s with no fries and no bebida.
Elias, the brains behind this operation, scoops his starter pizza off the toaster top with a spatula and puts it on a piece of wax paper on the tablecloth in front of me, then loads on the toppings I tell him I want. It looks like a salad by the time I am through and he finishes by slicing the pizza into fours for me.
This pizza stands up to my taste test.
I get lunch plus entertainment for three dollars.
Small cheap surprises are some of the best.
Sometimes travel Gods give you good outcomes.
You don’t have a plan, just strike out and do what seems to be interesting and they take you to places and events you didn’t know existed.
When I started this morning I was going to go to the Centro to check out the Museo of Modern Art, but when I saw a Pocitos bus pull up things changed. I didn’t deserve to find the farmers market in Pocitos, but I did. I could have gotten off my bus anywhere, left the beach at any street. Instead, I ended up on the exact street I needed and ran into a local farmers market in the middle of Pocitos on the right day of the week, at the right time.
Every Friday in this upscale community, at the intersection of Jose Marti and Chucarro streets, close to Avenida Brazil, there is a street closed off that becomes a marketplace. Some vendors sell out of custom made trucks, others have tents that shield them from the sun. Others have wares displayed on tables as people mill around looking for what they love. The produce looks great with vibrant color. There is lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, condiments, apples, cucumbers, nuts and spices, and most anything else a chef would need. There is beef and chicken, cheese and fish, sausage and eggs. Vendors sell to an upscale audience that pays well for fresh.
This event is commerce, the meeting of people who need things with people who have things to sell. This is one of the nicer areas of Montevideo I have seen, where old meets new and people with money and connections shop in old ways.
Trade is one of the world’s oldest religions.
Recent Comments