The Grocery Store

Change can be kinda hard sometimes. I like the United States; I'm a pretty big fan of fast internet, Starbucks, the english language, and hot showers. I am comfortable there. But nothing great ever happens inside your own comfort zone. Actually, everything truly satisfying that I have ever accomplished has been far outside where I feel comfortable. And let me tell you, South America is far, far outside where I feel comfortable.

Grocery stores are my comfort zone. Some of my earliest memories were in grocery stores; I used to go with my mom, sit in the buggy, and watch the rows go by in a blur. I can remember running down the freezer aisles as fast as I could, trying to escape that cold that seeps through your clothes when someone opens the glass door while reaching for some frozen item. I can remember watching my mom weigh enough apples for the week, then bell peppers, then bananas and then maybe an onion or a cucumber. During the summer, we would get watermelon and the huge box of icee pops that really taste like nothing but are perfect for those hot, humid days in July. The grocery store is comfortable for me: row after row of possibilities, all so familiar and so the same. 

Here, the grocery store is not familiar to me. The grocery store, as we have it at home, is non-existent. There are grocery stores, but they are not the same; the aisles are full of paper towels, giant water bottles, and bags of milk. It is not what know. Most of the produce is sold off the street from cartons stacked one on the other. Bananas sit next to oranges and apples, red and green grapes spill over the sides of wooden crates, and lettuce takes up the space of the neighboring onions and cabbage. Prices are hand-written, and they change sometimes according to the owner’s preference or the season or the next store’s price. Normal streets become the grocery store, sometimes stalls with produce, sometimes stores called “kioscos” with cold drinks and alfajores, and sometimes bakeries selling empanadas and croissants. For me, the grocery store is a place; here, the grocery store is an experience, an all-day event that ends with bags from five different stores that contain everything from apples to paper towels to cans of “Coca Light.” It is, surely, not what I am used to. But that doesn't mean it isn't good, or maybe even better. 

Getting Started

When I arrived in Montevideo, I didn't know what I was doing. The airport was small, but even so, in Spanish, so naturally a little confusing. After the shortest customs experience ever, I was thrown into a country that I knew very little about. After obtaining a couple taxis for the group, I was on my way to the main city. The hotel was in the neighborhood of Pocitos, next to Río de la Plata and La Rambla, a very nice stretch of pathway along the beach of the river. Quickly I got accustomed to the slow pace of Montevideo; it was the layout of a huge city with the population of a town and the pace of the countryside. Nothing happened quickly, ever. And it was wonderful. The old city was centered around the cathedral, a gorgeous church too full of show to generate any true worship but at the same time too beautiful to doubt its divine inspiration. We listened to lectures at the public university two days, one on celebrations in Uruguay and the other a basic review of the history of the country.
We spent a week in the capital of Uruguay before taking the short bus ride to Colonia del Sacramento, the first city founded in Uruguay. If we thought Montevideo was slow, it was nothing compared to the pace of the colonial city we now inhabited. After walking the entirety of the town, we climbed the tallest structure we could find: the lighthouse. From the top, we could see across the Río de la Plata towards Argentina and across the flat expanse of Uruguay towards Montevideo.
The next morning we took the fast ferry to the biggest city in South America: Buenos Aires. This is the place we had been talking about for the whole year, waiting to arrive in the hustle and bustle of the Paris of South America. It seems to be a maze of straight avenues with no end and too many people to be real, a confusing conundrum of frozen images that blur from the rush of the day. Tell me life isn't some kind of beautiful here.