Montevideo´s Upper Crust

Today I had the chance to see how the other half lives...the upper crust as it were. I took the bus to the area of Montevideo known as Pocito. There they have a genuine shopping mall flanked by McDonalds and other American fast food franchises and a 25 story Sheraton Hotel. A number of the names of businesses on the street are in English. This, I believe, is simply an affectation and not an attempt to draw in English speaking tourists. I rarely overhear English being spoken.

The sea wall works its way all the way up to here from the old town of Montevideo. The difference now is that there is lots of beach on one side. On the other side are ten to twenty story high apt. houses stacked side by side. (or condos, one or the other). The wide sidewalk on the sea wall, or "rambla" has lots of people on it, mostly joggers. The majority of the joggers look very spiffy, dressed in modish spandex, earphones plugged into their mp3 players, and already looking quite physically fit.

The side walls of the tall apartment houses literally abut each other, just like the houses in the Marina district in San Francisco. the line of high rise apartment houses continues north as far as the eye can see. I tried looking for a cafe and ended up walking about 2 miles past all these apartment houses until I finally realized I had to walk off the main beachfront avenue to some of the smaller streets where cafes can afford to pay the rent. From my perspective, Montevideo is definitely not hurting for an upper class! I would be curious to know what the occupancy rate here is. A number of the apartments appeared to me to be shuttered. It could very well be that a good number of apt. owners are weekend folks from Buenos Aires.

Since I was in Montevideo I HAD to visit the town´s famous soccer stadium which hosted the first ever World Cup soccer match in 1930. The stadium is obviously quite old. The little museum there was a little disappointing but they did offer a great video of newsreel footage showing Uruguay defeating Argentina in the first World Cup match.

Tomorrow I´ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the folks known in Mexico as Vaqueros, in Venezuela, llaneros, in the U.S., cowboys, in Hawaii panolos and in Uruguay and Argentina, GAUCHOS. Hasta luego, pardner.