For the mom with endless patience…

I am a terrible daughter! My mom and Paula (my dad’s cousin) came to visit me during the last week of March, for 8 days! We had an absolute blast, and I’ve been promising (and failing) to post pictures for about three weeks now. Well, today’s the day!! Here you go!

I’ve added all the photos I have to a folder on my Flickr Page so that you can see them!

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My Unforgettable 21st Birthday…

(Click any photo to enlarge)

…was spent in Cabo Polonio, Uruguay, population 80 people, 90 diseased dogs, and thousands of fleas.

Above is a photo of our shack, and us waiting outside in the rain for the monster truck to come carry us away. (Little did we know that there wouldn’t be another bus out for six and a half hours.)

(My bedroom)

(The shower…also the bathroom)

Cabo Polonio is first and foremost a beach town, and seeing as it was pretty much raining for the entire time, there wasn’t much to do once we had visited the 6 little vendor stands and climbed the lighthouse (which is not called “casa de luz”, just so you know for future reference). Below you’ll find a view of the entire town…

We spent the better part of the trip sitting in the one open restaurant drinking wine and watching the waves and the rain. Really that’s about all we did in the 18 hours we were there. The people (all three of them) in the restaurant were very nice, and we practiced lots of Spanish, sang some songs, and ate a couple meals there. The waiter even brought me some flan with a candle in it!

Somehow we slept in the icky beds in the icky house (it helped that there was no electricity so we could not see where we were sleeping) and the following morning (my real birthday) we woke up to a drippy roof, and that brings us back to the first photo of this post. We caught the monster truck (here’s a shot of ours from when we first arrived) intending to catch the bus that should have come at 8:40am.

We got the the bus stop, it was pouring rain by then, and waited for a bit. No bus. Nikki and Alison went to ask when the bus would be coming and discovered that since it was raining there would only be one bus…at 3pm…
They asked to use the phone to call a cab to get us into a town. No minutes left on the phone…So they asked to buy a phone card from the little stand next door…”The kiosco won’t be opening today because it’s raining…”
Not taking no for an answer, but ready to kill someone, Alison found an old man to drive us into town in the back of his truck for UY$400 pesos. They assured us there would be more buses leaving from the terminal there in Castillos. Turns out the bus didn’t leave there until 2:45…the same bus we would have caught. Fine, we say, we’re in a town at least! Turns out Castillos has the highest suicide rate in Uruguay, because there’s nothing to do there…
seriously.

Anyhow, we eventually made our way back to Montevideo, hooked up with the rest of our travel group and some new friends found in Punta del Diablo, and the new friends took us out for a fabulous Asado! It was a grand old party and we went out later and they sang me happy birthday in 6 languages!

Back to our familiar and comfortable hostel for the evening, and then we caught the Buquebus ferry home in the AM. Can you see how happy we are to be going home? It was a great trip, and I’d do it all again, but it certainly got a bit tense at times! For 9 people to head of on an adventure like that when half had only known one another for 24 hours is pretty crazy, but the fact that we all came home fabulous friends is a gift!

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Shake Your Monedas!

(click any image to enlarge)

We made it home from Uruguay! It was quite a trip! Our group ranged from 7 to 9 on any given day, and we got quite a bit of traveling done in only 6 days. We started out in Montevideo, which was a great little city, although we really had no idea where anything was, and there didn’t seem to be many people there when we arrived on Friday. I think people must head out to the beaches on the weekends. The boat left late (typical) and it was pretty much dark when we finally got off in the city. We wandered a bit until we found a hostel with room for 9, and then went out for some dinner and dancing.

(This is what happens when you order a hamburger with the works…)

From Montevideo we went on to Punta del Diablo, out on the eastern coast of Uruguay. It is a quiet little beach town with no ATM and only a handful of restaurants. Nikki was brilliant this time around and called ahead to make a reservation at a hostel owned by a young couple from Wisconsin. It still took us forever to find, and when we got there our reservation was under some strange name, but we got to stay!

The beach was just a short walk away, and on the beach was the restaurant that belonged with the Hostel. Both were great! Some of us went horseback riding through a national park one evening, which was much more painful than we remembered it being from when we were young, but was an adventure none-the-less!

I’m going to stop here, but we did do further traveling, it just needs its own post because it was ridiculous! Punta del Diablo was definitely our favorite spot the whole trip, and when we made the decision to move on to Cabo Polonio we really had no idea what we were in for…

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#29: Matters of Choice

Book: Matters of Choice by Noah Gordon
Pages: 448
Entertainment Rating: 3.5/5
Snooty Rating: 2/5
Total Rating: 5.5/10
Books Read Total: 29/50
Pages Read Total: 5671/15,000

–Insert summary here–(sorry)

Before anyone starts judging me, I read this book at the beach. I’ve been on vacation for the past few days (still am, as a matter of fact!) and at my mom’s suggestion I’m reading some more entertaining, beachy reads this week. I’ve got Western lit, art history, anthropology, Spanish and contemporary Buddhism courses starting in almost a week, so it’s safe to say this is some of the last breezy reading I’ll be doing.

All that said, this wasn’t laborious to read. I didn’t realize that it was the third part of a trilogy until just now when I went searching for a cover shot. Apparently the first two novels are of a much higher caliber, so don’t tell any Gordon fans that I picked it up thinking it would be some cheesy romance (which it is, a bit, in parts.) Anyhow, I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it, but I wouldn’t scream “Don’t do it!” if someone took it out of the Library or found it left behind at their grandmother’s house.

Now, I’m going to admit that the book I’m reading now is one of Hamilton’s Anita Blake vampire books. You have every right to ridicule me but I’m telling you her books are hard to ignore. I can never decide if I’m weirded out enough to put the book down. On a similar note, I was in the bookstore the other day and since when is V.C. Andrews considered kid lit! I wouldn’t touch another one of her books with a ten foot pole, let alone give it to a kid!!

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