What´s the Password? Mattress? Come on up! Well played sir!

I CAN NOT TELL YOU HOW GORGEOUS MONTEVIDEO IS. Tucker wasn´t kidding when he told me he thought I was a flight risk because I might not actually leave. And he was right, I might not actually leave...:)

Our hostel has become one giant family or at least it feels that way. We stayed our first night in a room with two Australians and two Argentines. How funny, 2, 2, and 2. It was kind of incredible to sit in the room and discuss how different the three countries were with one another.

 Oh and our Hostel: beautiful. The people running the place are all younger except for the house keeper, I would say he´s middle aged. He speaks very limited English and we´ve had many moments of pointing and smiling as our best form of communication. For breakfast they bring you coffee, toast, and the moistest watermelon you´ve ever tasted. Everyone sits around like family and discusses their home countries

Every night here is a ¨late night¨. You don´t go to sleep until two or three in the morning and it is very, very normal. If you eat before 10pm, you look like a crazy. Last night I was up rather late trying to get ahold of Tucker and an older gentleman came and joined me at the table. You have to realize if you are sitting at ¨the table¨ it basically becomes an invitation to talk. So the gentleman sits with me, tells me his name is Edward and that he´s been travelling around South America for something like three months now....and he´s Irish. I guess my face must´ve lit up when he said he lived out side of Galway because he asked if I had been there and so launched another hour long discussion about the glory of Ireland and the wonderful people there.

Zach ate everything we made for dinner last night. Which was a lot. But at 1 in the morning we were hungry again an Edward offered us his food. So we are including him in our dinner tonight. It is much cheaper here to just cook in your hostel with groceries than it is to go out and have dinner. Not saying that dinner is exactly expensive. The first night out we found a relatively close restaurant and just walked in. As custom, we ask everyone if they speak English or not (which makes you feel awful by the way and is incredibly embarrassing). Well, no on in the restuarant spoke Spanish. Once again, a lot of pointing, head nodding, smiling and laughter between us and our waitress. In the end my check leveled out at maybe $8, but the portion they gave me was gargantuan.

We spent a large portion of yesterday laying on the beach. I wish I could describe what Montevideon beaches are like, it will be hard, but I will do the best I can. Basically everyone here is beautiful. Particularly the women, they are just gorgeous. Granted there are still ¨bigger¨ women or older, but in general they are all very pretty. When you get to the beach there are hundreds of people lounging and absolutely NOBODY CARES WHAT THEY WEAR OR LOOK LIKE WEARING IT. I´ve never seen so many G'string bikinis and speedos in my life. IN MY LIFE. There is no open bottle law here so while on the beach I drank a bottle of cheap, but freaking delicious wine made in Uruguay without any one giving us a second look.

We did have a bit of a wake up call yesterday when an older gentleman who, randomly, studied anthropologique biologique (forgive me if this is entirely wrong) approached us and began speaking to us. He was very nice, but later one of his friends approached us and engaged in a conversation with the man. The man became very stone faced and told Zach that three ¨banditos¨ had been watching us hang out on the beach for about an hour and they most likely had a gun. We left and went up to the little beach side bar for a while and then just went to another part of the beach. It was just too beautiful to be scared away from a beach like that.

I truly wish my words seemed more expressive than they do robotic right now. I think I am just reeling from the horrid 7 hour delay in LAX, the almost missed flight from Santiago, and the most horrifying plane take off in my life. But so far it´s all been worth it. It is our last night in Montevideo. I am kind of sad to leave it behind. It actually feels a little like home, just a lot more warm and a little nicer people. There was freak thunder and lightening storm last night and we were told this was the first rain here in forever. We explained to everyone not to worry about it, we come from Oregon and probably brought the rain with us....

Until then-

Jlau

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