Erin & Matt's Blog: Montevideo

Day 12 – Day of the Gnocchi and rowdy street parties

On Sunday morning (well almost afternoon given we don’t get up til 11 most days) we walked the half an hour or so across town to Feria de Tristan Narvaja, an outdoor market run by Italian immigrants. It turned out to be a bit more of a locals market with lots of fresh produce for sale as well as electrical goods, antiques and books, loads of different Mate cups and animals such as puppies, rabbits, owls, peacocks, tarantulas, snakes and lizards. Matt cracked it at me for almost being sucked into a betting ring of ‘which cup is the ball under’ (the second oldest trick in the book but I was only watching!!). Rain set in just as we got near the end of the four or five street stretch, so we hurried back to the very first stall we saw selling big heaps of gnocchi and fresh vegies to get us some dinner for gnocchi day. Uruguayans celebrate ‘Day of the Gnocchi’ on the 29^th of each month, pay day being the end of the month and this being the only thing affordable by this time of the month! I very much like this tradition and have decided to celebrate it once a week so far! On the way back to the hostel we dropped into Mercado del Puerto for some shelter hoping the rain would ease off. Mercado del Puerto is the old port market building and famous for its impressive wrought iron superstructure, although we weren’t so impressed when a lightning bolt struck the door frame we were standing under whilst contemplating our dash back to the hostel...! It was quite a fright and extremely loud! The whole frame lit up with electricity. The rain only got heavier and with nothing else of interest nearby we got soaked getting back to the hostel.

Montevideo is the capital city of Uruguay and had been pretty quiet in general over the weekend due to an election for El Presedente. After watching a number of crappy movies dubbed into Spanish and chatting to other travellers forced back to the hostel by the weather, we switched on the news to see if the election had been called and ‘the Uruguayan Obama’ had won as predicted. The election had been called and “Pepe” Mujica had indeed won. We started to hear fireworks and people cheering in the streets outside the hostel and gradually over an hour or so people started pouring into the city centre. After such a boring day Matt and I and Julio (Spain) and Pontus (Sweden) decided to hit the streets and see what was happening. Not quite as rowdy as the soccer, but still with an impressive repertoire of songs with actions, thousands of people with red, blue and white flags had gathered at the waterfront. After only half an hour we were forced by the rain to retreat again to the hostel to watch Mujica’s speech on TV and cook up our gnocchi. Pretty much every foreigner watching agreed that the Uruguayans had better like the VP too, as Mujica is about 75 not out and could barely talk so we weren’t sure how he would run a country.