Piriapolis the first 24 hours

Meet our cat, Sol (Sun). OK, she technically belongs to our neighbor but since our windows are usually open she comes and goes as she pleases. The perfect kind of cat to call your own. We don't feed her or pay her medical bills. However, when we head out of town we do have to make sure she is not slumbering somewhere in our home before we close and lock everything up! This is where we found her before our departure to the little coastal resort town of Piriapolis.

Amarras Reales (Royal Mooring) is the name of the complex we stayed at, at the invitation of Jorge Rial an especially nice person we met at a Rotary Club meeting.  

 We were on the top floor as you can see by this picture of Bonnie talking to me while I was down at the swimming pool.  Somehow, I always feel I am looking up to this woman!

We went out to dinner but since it was early by Uruguayan standards (8:00) we beat the wait staff to the restaurant, Puertito de Don Anselmo. This is a very popular and well known restaurant right on the water but as you can see we were the first to arrive.

A lovely view of the port as we had breakfast on the terrace.

Here is a view from the living room looking out at the terrace. Bonnie is studying the maps to plan out the sights we will be seeing.

Proving she deserves to be Shawna's sister, one of our first stops is a marine animal rescue center where we signed up to volunteer.

It had a very nice location right on a beach. I had passed it earlier on my morning run and had wondered what it was. The hill in the background (San Antonio) is the hill our complex was built in/onto. The palm fronds are hiding our "home away from home".

 

These penguins were very cute and friendly.

This was a very active sea turtle.



This type of seal is called a Sea Wolf (lobo marino) in Spanish.

This inquisitive baby Sea Lion looked more like a relative to the Loch Ness monster in this photo.

Here he is practicing the pose he will take as an adult.

You can't tell from the perspective of this picture but this is a much larger, full-grown Sea Lion. It made us sad, because he is missing his right eye, and this was the day our dog, Lancelot, was to go into surgery to have his right eye removed.

We rode the chairlift from the bottom of our complex to the top of San Antonio Hill.

This is one of my favorite views. Especially with Piriapolis in the background!

Here is a close-up shot of the city and the beach.

Piriapolis is known for its beautiful views of the sunsets. It was very disorienting for us to have the Sun sinking into the West over the Atlantic Ocean (yeah, yeah, we know it is still technically the Rio de Plata here but you can see the imaginary boundary between the two bodies of water from here).

Returning back down the mountain after the sun has set and the lights are coming on.

In the previous close-up photo of Piriapolis from the top of the hill in the background you could see the beach was full of people who were there to enjoy the sunset. A short time later it is basically empty.

The sidewalks alongside the beach, however, are not empty!

I loved this surf shop because they had covered the floor with sand to make an indoor beach!

While looking for a restroom we wandered down a hall at the back of a video arcade and discovered a courtyard with a swimming pool and human sized "hamster balls".

Of course, we had to try it! Climb inside and hope it really will fill with air.

Hard to believe, but this has always been a dream of Bonnie's, to be inside a giant "hamster ball".  I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have to say about such dreams?

Standing up is much harder than you would think!


They should have paid us a commission since the place was empty when we discovered it and when we left there were dozens of people!

Afterwards we stopped at a Pizza place with a familiar name. That is a genuine wood-fired pizza oven in the background. They are pizza masters here. 32 flavors and they sell it by the meter (that is like us selling it by the yard)?

First of the year feria, peace, tranquility, and ideal weather

I went to the "feria" (similar to a mobile outdoor mall consisting of about 500 farmer's markets, jewelry stores, clothes stores, toy stores, craft stores, and just about anything you can think of) on the second day of this new year. The feria is set up and taken down in a nearby plaza every Saturday. The day was as absolutely gorgeous as the first day of the year was.

Everywhere I go I detect a totally different atmosphere. It can only be due to the fact that the vast majority of people (probably more than a million) are now on vacation for the next month. The feria was very crowded, as usual. The difference was that all of a sudden the vast majority of people looked like tourists to me. I see very few people I would be comfortable asking for directions because they do not look like they live here. Nearly every person who passes me I expect to be speaking a foreign language rather than Spanish.  I continue to be wrong in my expectations.

Kristie, Chris, and Kaori have walked these very aisles with us.

Play Station 2 games are quite inexpensive here and there are lots of kiosks, like this one, full of PS2 games to be had for $5 or less.

There is always someone selling puppies. At least this week they were in a cage rather than a box or running loose, so I didn't have to stop and pet them.  They are still very, very cute and they always make me miss our dog, Lancelot.

 These are a couple of the local recyclers which sort out the recyclables from the dumpsters. Their cart is registered with the city and you see these carts frequently every day as they make their routes checking all the dumpsters on their assigned route. Somehow it just seems wrong that people who make their living from dumpster-diving are licensed to do so by the city.  These boys were working with their father who just stepped away from the cart.

To match the weather, the ocean (river) was a timid body of water barely daring to lap at the shore, and when it did it seemed to apologize and not to stir for quite a while after each such "mishap".

Even more quiet were the streets, as you can see by looking at our street which rarely has more than one or two open parking spots.  Suddenly there are parking spots everywhere all over the city.  This is due to the fact that people are on vacation and are visiting family or have moved out for a month to a summer rented home near the beach or possibly in the interior. Every inch of beach is public property so it is accessible from anywhere. No fences, no homes, nothing bars the way between the coast highway/street and the soft, white sandy beaches, so if you can find a place to rent within a few blocks of the beach, you have guaranteed and unimpeded beach access.  I like that!

Saturday, Sunday, & Monday (Beaches & Food)

I remember when I was in Spain how most everyone took off for summer vacations and the streets and city basically emptied. 30 years later I am seeing the same phenomenon, but seemingly even more pronounced.

The Uruguayans have been complaining because the weather has been much cooler and wetter than what seems "normal" to them. For Bonnie and me, who only know what we are experiencing, we are quite satisfied. Especially since we were prepared for very hot and humid days. However, beginning with the new year, the weather has been outstanding. Saturday was low 80s with a mild breeze and beautiful sunshine.

Here's Bonnie headed to the beach on Saturday. You can even see the river is mostly ocean- blue and clearer (less sediment) than we have seen previously.

The quantity of people on the beach has suddenly ramped up as well.

We headed out to try a little Mexican restaurant in a nearby area that is kind of like an outdoors mall food court. There are about 8-10 restaurants that are side-by-side kiosks with tables and chairs on the sidewalk. Thankfully, the Mexican restaurant was one of the three restaurants that were not closed due to summer vacation. Since Mexican food is not well known here, the waitress went through her spiel of explaining what the nachos were and how to eat them with the sauces provided.

We walked down the beach afterwards and at the far end is a beach sports arena erected for the summer. We watched a boys soccer game before walking back home for the night.

Sunday was fast Sunday and the new Priesthood and Relief Society manuals were passed out, except there is only one per family and none for our family since they told Bonnie in Relief Society I would get one in Priesthood meeting and they told me, Bonnie would get one in her Relief Society meeting!

Thankfully, Aaron & Emily Campbell invited us over for crepes to break our fast. Or maybe it was the kids who invited us after they heard the parents saying they were going to have crepes (creeps) for dinner! In any case we took different brands of Dulce de Leche and had a blind taste test. Here's four of the Campbell kids (Emma, Elijah, Malachi, & Madelena) doing their jobs as taste panelists.
 
 
I snapped another picture that afternoon of our very busy beach and our very un-busy road (the cars you see are all parked cars).

Monday broke with a raging thunderstorm and serious rain for about an hour and later this afternoon the weather broke and the sun peeked out at times so we went down to the beach to read a little and I snapped this shot to show the contrast of how vacant it had become from yesterday and the day before.

Bonnie is making me eat healthier (New Year's improvements) so I snapped this shot of our afternoon merienda- cheese, membrillo, carrot sticks, red peppers, tomatoes, turkey, more cheese, bread, and mayonnaise.

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Tonight we saw the movie "Avatar" in 3D. We think this may be our first 3D movie at a theater. All I'll say is the special effects are what makes the movie- $300,000,000 worth of effects, in fact!


Since the movie is nearly three hours long and started at 11:00, it is now after 3:00 AM, so I think I shall retire for the day.  G'night and God bless.

Christmas Eve Fireworks

It often seems to me that one of the greatest wastes of film comes from efforts to capture awesome fireworks displays so, being the very bright, logical person that I am, I have chosen to finally update our blog with photos of incredible Christmas Eve fireworks that in the transition from memories and real life will likely bore everyone else to tears! At least Bonnie and I (along with our fellow spectators) will have the pleasure of reliving an experience that, for us, truly merited the full and literal definitions of the adjectives "unbelievable" and "incredible". 

On Christmas Eve, after a little beach time with Aaron, Shannalee, Kit & Kayda (Akaydia), Hansen (from Idaho), Suzie Archer (from Tasmania, Australia), 

 

Kristie (daughter), Chris Dawson (from Krypton), and Kaori (seven year-old granddaughter)

we had a little dinner at our apartment and then went to the Hansen's because we had heard there would be lots of fireworks on Christmas Eve and the Hansens have a corner apartment on the 11th floor (according to the USA method of counting floors) which not only has a great view of the beach and the skyline from the front, but also on the side overlooks the little plaza in front of our apartment. 

About 11:30 we went out on their balcony to watch what we considered an amazing display of fireworks.  Here's all of us out on their balcony with the city skyline in the background.

Here is a shot of the city skyline behind us looking across the bay.

 

We were very impressed with the fireworks we were seeing...

And then at about five minutes before midnight we transitioned from "amazing" to "incredible" and "unbelievable".

It was, and still is, very difficult to accept the fact that all these fireworks were launched by individuals.

There were no organized fireworks displays.  The government spent $0 on purchasing, organizing, securing, or whatever other costs are associated with public firework displays.

 It reminded me of a city being mercilessly bombarded in a night scene of a war movie- only 100 times more impressive! .

     

 Seemingly, there are no illegal fireworks in Uruguay. They are launched from roof tops, sidewalks, streets, or where ever anyone wants, including the plaza just below us.  Here are a few photos of those that occasionally detonated in the air right beside us on the 12th floor balcony!

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Things that stood out to me:

• 
  
  It went on and on and on and finally began subsiding around 12:30 AM.
  
  
  

• 
  
  Since we were looking out to sea we were only privy to a very small portion of the city skyline. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be up high in the center of the city. I know, for a fact, I cannot imagine it because there was absolutely no way I could have ever imagined what we witnessed if I had not seen it for myself.
  
  
  

• 
  
  The sounds coming from all the ground level fireworks and the fireworks behind us which we could not see! 
  
  
  
• 
  
  The car alarms that were going off!
  
  
  

• 
  
  The fireworks launched from the plaza beside us that exploded right beside, above, or below us- we felt like we were IN the fireworks. In fact, with the first unexpected and astonishingly close explosions, there was a small stampede towards the door back into the apartment (except Bonnie who simply hunkered down and peeked over the balcony wall). Of course, being enthralled with the view and the sounds we quickly put ourselves back into harms way. Luckily no one lost an eye or had their hair catch on fire!
  
  
  

• 
  
  The assessment of the elevator attendant (Hansen's apartment building, originally, was a posh hotel and still has elevators with attendants to run the controls that look like the circular speed-control lever on old ships (you know- Full Speed Ahead, All Stop, All Reverse, etc).  Upon our departure we were attempting to express how impressive the fireworks had been to us and the attendant's response was simply, "Poco, muy poco, este año (small, very small, this year)," and he was dead serious.  It seems the economic crisis has impacted the quantity of fireworks being detonated!
  
  
  

• 
  
  The observation of some life guards at the beach the following day that, for some unknown reason (to them), North Americans are usually overly impressed by the Christmas and New Year's Eve fireworks displays! 
  
  
  

• 
  
  The assurances everyone gives us that the fireworks on my birthday (oh yeah, some people also celebrate New Year's Eve that night) are even more impressive! I'm going to hate to miss that, but we are celebrating New Year's Eve with our Uruguayan friends, Gerardo & Rosario and Jorge & Andrea who have rented a house at a beach outside the city. It is summer vacation time here (school is out) and, by law, everyone gets a minimum of three weeks of vacation.  Although Bonnie is supposed to have the entire month of January off, she does have to attend a conference and make a presentation in Costa Rica the last week of January so she only gets the minimum three-week vacation! 
  
  
  

Anyway, we will make sure we purchase some fireworks of our own to take with us and I expect we will still see quite a show from everyone else who is in the vicinity of where ever we will be!

OK, so now we have added our testaments to the facts that film and small screens cannot do justice to fireworks, a tripod should always be used for night pictures, photos always make things look so much farther away than they are in real life, and you will never believe how close we were to the close up fireworks (no zoom function was used)!

That's a "wrap" for now.  Merry Christmas to all and

to all a good night!

If you are a glutton for punishment check out Kristie's video clips of the fireworks at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d_XNfU6mJE  (the close up detonations occur at 6:00 and 8:30 minutes)

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzo79og6nhw  (the close up detonations occur at 0:00 3:15, 4:20 [1], 5:30, and 7:30 minutes)

I especially like the recorded comments and the sounds of the ambulances in the background!