Returning from a trip, I’m always asked “How was (city name here)?” and I always struggle with the answer. What words can I use that can’t be used for every other city? Writing, I have the advantage of having as much time as I choose to use to describe my experience and I can write things in a manner that is more descriptive than a conversational style.

On my first day here, a local told me not much happens in Montevideo and time flies by. The pace of life here is never rushed and it’s never too late for anything, literally. Running on La Rambla at night, I see more runners than I saw in the marathon I ran in Olympia. Work out groups meet in the park at 9:30 a la noche and dinner as early as 8p.m. is practically unheard of. Everyone greets everyone in the room with a kiss on the cheek and says farewell to everyone with a kiss on the cheek, even those they never spoke with. This even goes for my tango classes and for office workers. Most restaurants aren’t open for lunch and the workday begins closer to 11a.m. Most of the buildings are from the 19th century, are in various stages of crumbling, and have graffiti on them. Most other buildings are built to fit in with the 18th century style, although not posing to be from the  same time period themselves. Every block has some street art. The sidewalks are composed of roughly 8″x8″ cement tiles pushed up at various angles due to the allees of mature Pocitos trees shading every street. The curves match the gently rolling hills of the streets themselves. I can walk anywhere I want to go in Montevideo in less than a half hour.

The locals of Montevideo are notably kind, unless they are trying to give you the tourist price. They’re happy and smiling, go out of their way to be helpful, and too often apologize for their lack of English vocabulary. The politics are left leaning. Voting is obligatory. Medical marijuana is newly legalized. The former President Mujica was in-prisoned during the guerrilla war against the military dictatorship of the 70’s and 80’s and this played a roll in his humanitarian decision to accept six of the over sixty victims of Guantanamo Bay cleared for release (57 are still waiting for a country to accept them). I met two of the victims of Gitmo in front of the U.S. embassy where they were protesting in tents for months on end for aid from the U.S. government after being imprisoned and tortured for over ten years without a trial. They were extremely kind and even insisted I have some cookies.

Leading up to the elections, the city is decked in posters with candidates’ faces, you can’t leave your house without a campaigner handing you a flier, and you can’t go six hours without hearing a vehicle, be it a van, truck, or bicycle with a trolly toting an amp blasting propaganda.

The other sounds this recognizable are the bells on the hoarse-drawn carriages driven by young men who live in the outer parts of the city, coming in to collect scrap metal, and the calls of parrots and pigeons, and Cumbia music rolling through the streets and parked next to La Rambla emphasizing the beet just after the 1,2,3, and 4 and the Candombe drummers parading twice weekly. The city is the most hi-fi city I’ve ever visited, only comparable in sound quality to some historical districts which are frequently hi-fi because of their quieter residential parts and lack of autos. 

The nightlife is filled with love of life. Although necessities in Uruguay are as expensive as island prices, luxuries such as entertainment are unheard-of cheap. Never did I see a slow or quiet nightlife scene. Never did I see more engaged audiences, singing and clapping along and giving the most supportive and encouraging applauses I’ve ever heard.

I believe Montevideo’s good vibes are owed to the unique culture of open-heartedness thriving there.

Every city has it’s street art but not every city has its street art on every street like I’ve seen in Montevideo.

Latin America has a rich culture of street art. It’s not illegal and is not considered graffiti like it is in some other countries (U.S.) Most of the art is ripe with cultural and political meaning although the meanings aren’t as obvious to me, an outsider to the city. The emotional meaning, as for all art-forms, speaks for itself. One theme I see in four pictures here are trees and roots connecting people. I love the character/culture street-art contributes to a city and wish there was more of it in American cities.

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Monday, we attended an incredible performance of La Filarmonica at the splendid Teatro Solis. The program was: Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, Tchaikovsky’s Variation on a Rococo Theme Op.33 with Stanimir Todorov playing the violoncello solo, and, my favorite, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Symphonic Suite Op. 35. Tickets were 150 Uruguayan pesos, a jaw-dropping $6.00. There was a lively social scene in the lobby with both the audience and the performers who showed up about twenty minutes before the show. When it was time, everyone filed into the concert hall. In Teatro Solis, one must allow an usher to show you to your seat. The ensemble played with a type of freedom and abandon that reminded me of feelings I felt were more potent when I was younger. In this style, the performance lacked the tight-jaws some associate with classical music. The dynamics were constantly in very noticeable flux and not a single audience member dozed, not even the sleepiest. The instruments blended together so well that I believe La Filarmonica of Montevideo rehearses together more than the Seattle Symphony! 

Tango is the national dance of Uruguay. It began directly across the Rio Uruguay in Argentina, and developed simultaneously in both countries. Although it is internationally famous for being a dance infused with sexual meaning, its beginnings had nothing to do with romance.

It began in the heated night scene of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the last quarter of the 1800’s. The country experienced an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe due to promise of work in the meat industry in a time when many people from Eastern Europe were looking for work. Men would arrive either as bachelors or to set up a life before their families’ eventual arrival. The public spaces were filled with men who worked together, lived together, ate together, drank together and danced together. This wild time pumped to the gills with testosterone was when tango started as a dance between two men, linked arm in arm who oftentimes ended the rough dance with a fight!

As one can imagine, brothels were popular among this crowd. Word has it that there was so much demand men would commonly have to wait their turn. The owners of the brothels hired musicians and dancers to keep the waiting patrons entertained and thus the tango morphed into a dance between both sexes. The musical scene of Buenos Aires and Montevideo incorporated indigenous, African, and European music as well as the longing of the immigrant population. As our host at JovenTango told us: it’s not just a form of entertainment, it’s a form of expression.

After that point in Tango’s history, it gained popularity in Europe when the first generation of Argentineans made exceptionally wealthy by the meat industry began traveling en masse to pinnacles of fashion like Paris and brought the tango with them. There, its style changed once more before being reimported to Uruguay and Argentina.

My first experiences of Tango were at Ines Camou’s dance studio, two blocks from my house. I miraculously found the place without a store-front and rang the buzzer to be let in through the courtyard, inside and down a flight of stairs. Ines teaches primarily ballet and over half the tango students are also her ballet students and members of the Montevideo Ballet Company.  The other people are middle-aged to mature couples. The basic tango step every gal should know is: left-forward, right-together, right-right, left-together, left-back, right-back, left-cross-over-right, right-swing-out-to-the-right. It’s eight steps, but in practice dancers more often than not don’t start the sequence from the first step. In fact, when I visited a venue that offers tango on Sunday, JovenTango, I didn’t complete the sequence a single time because tango in Uruguay is different from the better known Argentinean tango.

When I searched for places offering tango on domingo, I could only find one other place which I thought would have a more mature crowd due to the picture on the website. Although “joven” means “young” in Spanish, the venue still had a very mature crowd but that didn’t stop younger lovers of tango from showing up later on in the night. I learned from a couple sitting at a table next to us that the majority of the patrons used to frequent another tango venue that closed down about a decade ago. 

No one can go a weekend in Montevideo without hearing drummers parading from roughly eight to midnight or one in the morning (ending earlier on Sundays.) The word “candombe” literally means “pertaining to blacks” in Kikongo, the Bantu language of Congo. However, in Montevideo the adjective pertains exclusively to the drums typically used and tradition of playing them thrice weekly in the streets.

The first time I saw a group on Saturday night, when the most people are out playing music, I assumed that they congregated in a set place and paraded through all of Montevideo but I found out that the happening is much more spontaneous; the groups form hanging out on the streets in each individual barrio (neighborhood). More people filter into the streets when they hear the music approaching to join in or spectate.

The night begins with some people gathering on one corner, socializing and playing the drums, maybe cooking some meat over a fire. The sound is a signal to come down with some wine or something to cook on the fire and say hello to your neighbors. Eventually, two corners are occupied and, before you know it, the intersection is filled with drummers and dancers who’ve arranged themselves in lines without saying a word about it. Based on how the dancers and drummers communicate (using dance and rhythm) when to stop and start moving, there appears to be an unspoken hierarchy based on experience. The dancers dance in front of the drummers, and the lead dancers dance backwards in the back of the group in order to be closer to and facing the drummers, the most experienced of whom are in front. The one or two lead dancers signal that it’s time to start or stop moving or playing and the lead drummer plays a rhythm that lets the rest of the group know. There’s few things in music more attention getting than a good, clean ending and these spontaneous musicians have it down better than many groups I’ve seen who know each other well and play together regularly.

The rhythm is always changing without ever missing a dance beat. You probably won’t notice it’s changing unless you pay close attention. Most are playing the same rhythm with some adding accents of their own. For the most part, the rhythms are in call and response format slowly morphing into different calls and different responses. Oftentimes, the entire call and response will conjugate into one call with an entirely new response. One drummer may add a radically different rhythm (meaning noticeably different in its context to the untrained ear) and no one else will join him but two repetitions after the new rhythm stops, someone will pick it up again and others will join in the second time hearing it.

Here is a clip to give an example of rhythm and the size of the group:

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Candombe began when slaves of African decent gathered on Sundays and other holidays to make music together as a form of community self-help. Hundreds of years since slavery ended in Uruguay, people young and old of all different colors in every barrio drum and dance to lift their spirits.

I was surprised that a high percentage of the people on our flight were senior citizens. The nine hour flight from Miami to Montevideo, the only flight from the US to Uruguay, was around half full (so wasteful!) and all the old people and I got to lay down in our rows. The group I queued up with were the same three I was sitting near in the gate and they also happened to be sitting in the rows in front of and beside me. I complimented the woman’s flawless skin- when I first saw her in the gate, I thought she was a teenager but now realized she is the mother of the young teenage boy she was with. Her mother beside me had to translate my compliment- the first of many translations made on my behalf the past few days. I asked for a glass of wine from the flight attendant working the drinks cart to help me fall asleep and after he asked if I was twenty one and if I was sure I was twenty one, the dear man pored me two plastic cups full of wine. Maybe it was the lack of air pressure or maybe the airlines pick the booziest wine because they know everyone drinking it wants to sleep, maybe both because it went straight to my head. Although I was briefly drunk, I only slept for three hours. Waking up, I noticed for the first time, thanks to the map on the TV at the front of the plane, that I was flying farther than if I were to fly to North Africa. As the plane neared the ground, I noticed the area outside the city was sparsely populated and mostly grass lands dotted with bushes which is perfect for raising livestock, the largest export of the Uruguayo economy. I also saw what looked to me like small shanty villages and I wonder if they are for working or living or both. The grandmother next to me warned me that it’s getting colder here and I’ll need a jacket because it’s Fall (however, I’ve been sweating in shorts every day so far). After making it through customs, the young teenage boy ran up to me and handed me a note in Spanish on the back of the customs card introducing himself and summarizing his trip in America. I thought the saleswoman in the duty free was pointing out an advertisement to me as she was showing me the slot to put my customs card but the second time she explained to me (still in Spanish) I saw what she was pointing to. Then, it was time to find my bag which arrived the previous night (another story). After yet another translated conversation, I found the lost luggage counter and, although I had around five tickets, I didn’t have the ticket with the bag receipt on it. Luckily, the agent was able to find my bag anyway. I left security and found my ride holding a sign with my name on it- a service that costs $40 (and my German roommates say this city is expensive?!) I learned that taxi is an international word. After we got in the car, my driver called his boss and told him he picked up the muchacha. 

I love all of the Spanish words for woman I know so far: muchacha, chica, mujere, and my favorite: mamacita. I love it when people in Miami call me mamacita in conversation or in the context of an arepa purchase ect. Many of my favorite parts of South Florida culture are thanks to the Latin American influence: people with supernatural skin who are fun and friendly, going out late, staying out late, rhythm. Driving into the city, I was surprised to see the occasional horse drawn carriage transporting goods and how extensive La Rambla is- the park along the riverfront (seems more like a beach since you can’t exactly see Argentina on the other side). It completely wraps around the peninsula. I was happy to see so many people running on it- happy to know I would feel comfortable running here (not something I can say for every city, especially not our capital, D.C.) We took a right from the beach front and one park and two blocks later, we made it to my home for the next five weeks.

My landlord, the boyfriend of my Grandfather’s friend’s niece, was waiting in the doorway for me. He gave me two bronze keys, one of them them looks as old as the two hundred year old house, and a Spanish tour. Many of the buildings here are from the 19th century due to the meat export boom in the economy at that time. We walked up a flight of dusty marble stairs to the main living area (the first floor is another apartment). There are five bedrooms (with what looks like original wooden floors) encircling a small living area with a couch and a chair, and two more doorways leading to two small bathrooms and a small half kitchen. When I say small, I mean smaller than notoriously European small. I mean I have to squeegee the bathroom after my shower. Then, we took another flight of stairs to the other half kitchen. Lastly, we climbed one more wooden flight of stairs ( more like a ladder because you have to face it whether you’re going up or down) to the roof which is perfect for tanning and has a view of the river. My landlord left and I got to meet my roommates, three from Germany, one from Spain, two studying medicine, two studying political economy. All of them like to party.

I texted my contact, Manual, also a music student who my grandfather’s friend, a concert pianist named Enrique Graf, also set me up with. Manual was at my door shortly and he gave me a walking tour of our neighborhood and talked about life. I found out Manual also wants to compose for films and he hopes to attend University of Miami next year to study composition. We took a bus to the main street of downtown Montevideo for about $1.00 and checked out five music stores comparing prices of keyboards (I found the best price at a rocker store specializing in guitars.) We went through several squares, including the main square, Plaza Independencia, with a larger than life statue in the middle of Che Guavara, the hero responsible for so many beneficial social reforms throughout Latin America. On the far corner is Teatro Solis. As we crossed the square towards the old city gates to the Old City and the Teatro Solis, Manuel pointed out the conductor of the theater’s philharmonic, looking like any other city goer with a blue striped button down and a backpack. We went inside Teatro Solis to pick up a season program and headed to the other large theater of the city about five blocks away, the very snazzy, 80′s, grand, Auditorio Nacional Adela Reta. Although they were closed, we walked right in and an attendant gave us a tour. We saw stage hands setting up for an a cappella show and she told us about an upcoming performance in memorial of the Armenian genocide (I’m beginning to notice an Armenian influence here in the cultural events and cuisine). Manuel took me to a free museum outside of the Old City gates where he told me there is a white piano we can play. I found out the museum was the house of colonists. The original decorations were maintained including two pianos and a harpsichord. Although the house sits in the heart of Montevideo, at the time it was built it sat in pasture land. We took a closer look at two birds bathing in the fountain of the small garden. Manual dipped his hand in the fountain and exclaimed “This water is potable. All of the water in this country is potable isn’t that amazing? It’s the only country in South America with completely potable water.” I do find that amazing.

Since there was a sign on the piano saying “NO TOCAR”, Manual just asked a woman working there if we could play the piano anyway and took turns showing off to each other. By the time we left, the sun was setting and we had been walking around for a few hours. Manual took me to a restaurant to try a traditional Uruguayan dish of shredded potatoes, vegetables, and eggs. I learned that the Uruguayan pronunciation of “Uruguayo” is “urd-oo-guay-sho” (like show). I find the “sh” sound more Portuguese than Spanish and I hypothesize that the word stems from the Brazilian influence. Brazil neighbors Uruguay to the north.

On the way to the bus stop to go home, we made a couple stops. One was a casino where I gambled for the first time although Manual had to tell me everything to do since all the buttons on the Phantom of the Opera slot machine were in Spanish. The other was an ice cream parlor where I tried a delicious Uruguayan flavor of ice cream with dulce de leche and chocolate wafers that taste like cocoa puffs. After five hours of walking I came home exhausted.

Although I was ready to go to sleep, I decided I should make friends with my new roommates by helping them make chile con carne for a “family” meal around the coffee table. “What language should we speak?” asked Julio since my Spanish is next to nill and so is Claudia’s English. “Espanol por favor.” I asked. In this style of immersion, my Spanish has already improved, especially since Spanish with a German accent is easier for me to understand. During dinner, my roommates invited me to a “Couch Surfers’ meeting”. My curiosity of this meeting was greater than my fatigue so out I went.

We walked three blocks to the couch surfers’ meeting. Although it was around 10pm, we were a bit early. We bought a couple beers to share (the most common local beer is Patricia and it comes in 1L bottles) and walked upstairs to see if we could find a meeting. The last group we asked was having a birthday party and we joined them! I don’t really know why this happened or why I agreed to this but one of the woman painted the Swiss colors on my face. The night, like Montevideo itself, was casually fun. 

The quote is from Wordsworth’s Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored. He goes on to say that these “spots of time” “with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue […].” This aligns perfectly with a belief of mine that it’s the events we remember which change us including our imagination and taste. Whether this change is an impairment or an aid isn’t as easily stated. Regardless, Wordsworth’s idea is more specific than that; he speaks here of only memories with a renovating virtue.

As I sit propped up on my dorm bed (something I’ve done far too often the past six years) I question how exactly a spot of time can retain anything and if it did how could we ever access it again except in the abstraction of memory. Plenty of times (especially on a dorm bed) I’ve wished for a spot of time with renovating virtues. I’ve wished for trips to Moscow and Trinidad. I’ve wished to see people far away or long gone. I’ve wished for a spontaneous spiritual renewal and physical renovation, wrongly. Wordsworth specified renovating virtues are experienced outside of “false opinion and contentious thought, or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, in trivial occupations, and the round of ordinary intercourse”.

In Uruguay, I won’t be involved in any trivial occupations and there certainly won’t be any rounds of ordinary intercourse or any ordinary behavior for that matter. I’ll keep the web updated on any and all experiences of renovating virtues.

“Journeys are the midwives of thought” said Alain de Botton. Anytime we come into contact with something new, we put it into the context of past experiences and sensations. This, done consciously can be revealing as to what we think about, how we go about it, and why.

Visiting a new city, I begin with researching what cultural attractions the city has to offer before making some kind of plan of what I’d like to see. What a city contributes to culture is what it uniquely has to offer. These unique differences beg the question “Why the difference?” as well as stimulating passible answers in our head and further questions. It could be anything to a certain square or market to a certain painting in a museum or a style of architecture to all manners of people that stimulates our desire to see, hear, smell, taste, and learn more – in other words: travel more.

De Botton’s use of the word “journey” here is accurate because, at least in my world of traveling, you haven’t really seen enough of a city unless there’s blisters on your feet. I’ve hiked many a city, spending most of my traveling days on my feet wandering through neighborhoods one by one, museums, boutiques, wondering which restaurant to wander to next. My thoughts in this state can not be written down. Mostly it’s a matter of what catches my eye- maybe a red telephone booth on streets reflecting white with rain or a hand spun hand dyed hand knitted crop top, or giant tapestries depicting events too numerous to register at once. Other times, more of a small investigation takes place. For example, I read the plaque next to a piece of art I want to know more about or take special care to visit someplace I heard of and want to learn more about and experience for myself.

My favorite act of curiosity in the city is people watching. The best place for people watching in the city is escalators: either looking at people passing you on the left as you stand on the right or the people on the escalator going in the opposite direction. Although this necessarily takes place on a journey because I’m not from a city, I do not experience thoughts during this activity of the curiosity of people. I don’t form opinions or develop plans while I am doing this although perhaps towards the end of the trip I may remark “this is a very well dressed city.” Maybe when I return home I’ll be better dressed. However, most of my brain’s activity in the city is taking it all in and processing new images, smells, sounds, whatever.  I suppose I’m less of a thinker than de Botton because personally journeys create more subconscious inspiration than thoughts.

I leave for Montevideo in two days now. Technically less than two days, to be specific. The tickets were officially booked about two days ago since there was a last minute change of plans thanks to my lovely loving family. Thankfully, they helped with the last minute securing of a room in a student house (full of medical students I understand), a ride from the airport, musical contacts, and information about classes I want to take while I’m there such as Spanish, Salsa, and piano. Much thanks to my grandfather’s friend, Enrique Graf, a concert pianist from Montevideo who is well connected especially with the composers there.

Just let me pack my suitcase and Montevideo, here I come.