Anderson South American Adventure Day 6 Montevideo, Uruguay - “The Rain in Uruguay Falls Mainly on My Head.” March 9, 2020

We slept well, but I did not feel the normal rocking of the ship that we get when we cruise. Doh! We are on the Rio de La Plata. Tonight we will feel the rocking. Rob had booked a walking tour for us in Montevideo. We were to walk to Independzia Plaza and meet in front of the statue. As we went it started to rain. Rob tried to convince me that it was not rain that I was feeling but air conditioners dripping. I pointed out that if that was true they were dripping in the middle of the street. It was a bit of a hike to get there but we made it to the plaza. There was a huge barricade all of the way around the statue. Also just as we got to the square it started to rain. Oh, lucky us. We decided at the last minute that we did not need our jackets because the front had already gone through. There was a newspaper stand in the square with a decent overhang so we hung around there until the rain let up. We made our way around the barricade to the statue. There was another couple there also for the tour so we got to talking. Then we saw someone with a tee shirt that read “Free Walking Tour Montevideo” on. We wandered over and commented that we paid for the tour, why is it marked as “free?” As more people gathered and he started his spiel. He asked for first names and country of origin. There was one other person from the US. The rest were from: England, Ireland, New Zealand, Wales, Australia, Iceland, Canada, Scotland, and Brazil. Then I saw someone else with a tour tee shirt on so we went over to him and showed him our ticket. Oh, that tour meets on the other side of the statue. In other words the other side of the barricade. We worked our way around and the only tour people we saw had “French” on their shirts. Yeah, that would not work. It is now 10:23 so we probably missed our tour so we head back to the first tour. They were already taking off so we had to catch up. The sidewalks are not in great shape so I am not moving real fast. We get back to our group. The young man is a native of Montevideo so a bit of an accent. We are also downtown and there appears to be a tour bus going past every 2 minutes. I did not catch a whole lot of the history that he presented. I did not hear who was on the horse on the square, who the independence was from and when they won it. I did find out later that the statue was General Artigas and he was the father of Uruguay. the We would walk, he would give information, I got every third word and we would move on. He walked pretty fast and the average age of the tour was over 50. It would cloud up, rain, then clear off and the sun would shine. People would pull out their ponchos and umbrellas, we just got wet. As warm as it was if I had been wearing a plastic poncho I would have just been sweating and might actually be wetter than I was getting rained on. At one point we had a panhandler who was bothering us as we were trying to listen to the guide. The guide saw this and got into an argument with him in Spanish so we do not know what was said but the guide got him to go away. We went to a theater that is closed on Monday and went to a cathedral where he had to speak softly or the bishop would not be happy. As we left the cathedral it started to rain and looked pretty serious. The guide started to walk very fast and we followed him as well as we could. We ended up in a park with huge palm trees that kept us pretty dry. Growing up in the Midwest I get nervous standing under a tree in the rain, but I do have to admit that I had not heard any thunder. He talked about different aspects of Uruguay until the rains abated. On the way back we saw a guitarist who did a song for us. I only caught the end of it on video. We saw things, I got a good workout and we ended up in a converted train station that is now a mall with a few stores and several restaurants Mercado De Porto. He was talking about other things when I noticed the cat on the barrel in front of the wine store. The manager came out and told me that the cat works there. He had a group picture taken, not sure why and people tipped him. Rob gave him 1,000 Argentinian pesos. We had not gotten any currency for Uraguay. We headed back to the ship. We had to produce our cruise card and government issued ID. I had my cruise card handy and had to pull my drivers license out. Rob was struggling to get his wallet out and the police officer let us go past. We ate lunch, grabbed our computers and headed back into port to find wifi. We are not paying for wifi on the ship. I know that some cruise lines offer it for free when you hit a certain loyalty level but Holland America does not. You get a discount at four star level. We were told that you could get wifi behind the tourism building. Well, we could not. There are wifi zones around the town. We head back to the market and find a wifi zone pretty fast. I started out sitting on a bench. There was too much light there for Rob to see his screen so he settled in the shade near a kiosk that I figure the wifi was coming from. After a bit I decided to join him. We are both sitting on the ground dealing with what we can. See what I go through to get my adventures posted? We got back to the ship in time to play trivia. Today we won and there was no tie for first place. Woohoo, and we have another four weeks on this cruise. At dinner we sat with four new people, a couple from Arizona. The man informed us that his wife was highly allergic to alcohol and would die if she even got a whiff of it. Um, OK, we are drinking water. There were two women traveling together, one from London, Ontario and one from Louisville. The woman from Louisville has been very involved in Girl Scouts for many years. We had a lot of stories to share. They point out the ship grave yard to me, I wonder what the ultimate plan for these ships is? During dinner I noticed that the pilot boat was still behind us. I wondered why it was following. Aha, yeah, because the pilot was still steering the ship until we reached the end of the river. Sure enough after a while the boat pulled out from behind, the ship slowed a bit and then we saw the pilot boat heading back to port. We must now be on the Atlantic Ocean. After dinner I headed to the theater to get good seats for the illusionist. We were in the second row and Rob got selected to go up on stage. I have pictures and a video. At one point there was a trick where there was a nail in a bag and the rest no nail. The magician smashed his hand down on a bag that I told him to. There was no nail in any of them. The last two bags Rob had his hand hovering over the bags and I selected which one for him to smash his hand on. I told him to stop and he kept going so I said “he never does listen to me.” Then the magician asked if I was nervous I said “no, he has Medicare now .” Of course the bag that was not smashed had the nail. After that we went to “Game Night”. We already knew the activities director from trivia. We sat in the middle so that we could see what was happening. Well, we ended up being contestants. Luckily we had a woman on our team who knew movies well so we won the first round. The second round we had to act out a dance style so Rob and I went up. We got our team to guess 16 dances which is a new record. Yay us! Then we played a game where we had to get a team member to guess a word based on each teammate giving just a single one word clue. We creamed the other team so we did a different round and I went up. I got 7 answers corrects which is also a new record. This was a fun way to end a very full day.