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.