A Year in Uruguay

Although Montevideo isn't far from Buenos Aires, we didn't make the trip across the Rio as often as I expected. We did visit the bigger city a couple of times (and flew in and out a few more.) It's an interesting place.















Here's a video slideshow of some of my photos from Buenos Aires:

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires

Puerto Madero isn't Buenos Aires's working port anymore. The old warehouses are full of restaurants catering to tourists, including US chains like Hooters and Fridays. The cranes remain as decorative reminders of earlier days.

The new port has moved up the Río and handles shipping containers using even bigger cranes.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires

The Plaza de Mayo is Buenos Aires's main square. It's right in front of Argentina's "White House", known as the Casa Rosada [Pink House]. The police had erected barriers across the end of the plaza near the Casa Rosada to prevent protests.

The area surrounding the Plaza de Mayo has office buildings for various government agencies and private businesses. We saw an interesting end-of-the-year tradition: office workers throw armloads of paper out the window, like giant confetti. It was the last workday of 2006 and papers filled the trees and made drifts along the curb.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires

San Telmo is an old neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The street are narrow and full of interesting buildings. It seems much more redeveloped than Montevideo's ciudad vieja. There are antique shops throughout the barrio selling silver mates, gaucho knives, marble pedestals, painting, and more. It hosts a well-known market on Sundays.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, like Montevideo, has many distinct neighborhoods. We stayed in Palermo, home to the botanical garden, a zoo founded in 1874, and several parks. We visited the Malba museum of art that features many Latin American artists, including paintings by the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires

In many ways, Buenos Aires seems like a bigger, flashier, faster version of Montevideo. The biggest difference is one of scale: the greater Buenos Aires area has more than 10 million residents. This leads to many differences; Buenos Aires has city streets with 10 lanes in one direction, a university with over 300,000 students, a subway system, more shopping malls, many more skyscrapers, and generally more of everything.

Buenos Aires was also hotter. While both cities are on the Río de la Plata, Montevideo seems to get more of the sea breeze.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires, Uruguay

We spent most of Friday and Saturday in Buenos Aires visiting friends from the US who have family there. We took a bus to Colonia and then the Buquebus ferry across the Río. The bus took about 3 hours and the boat took about 45 minutes.

Argentinian protestors had threatened to stop the Buquebus ferry as part of their economic blockade of Uruguay during the tourist season. The protesters closed the border at Fray Bentos for the entire summer last year and they are blocking it now. The protestors announced they would expand their blockade to include the ferry, but Argentina's government intervened, so we were able to travel.

We didn't spend a lot of time in Argentina but we enjoyed what we saw. I'll post some pictures soon.

Labels: Argentina, Buenos Aires, Uruguay