Last week I
flew to and from Montevideo from my home in Northern California. The trip takes about 25 hours with layovers
for connecting flights, airport to airport; it’s a long way south and east to
that part of South America. According to
American Airlines, it’s about 7,000 miles one-way. My route took me from Sacramento to
Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami to Montevideo and vice-versa. Miami-Montevideo and the return trip are overnight
flights where an hour or two of sleep makes all the difference in how you’ll
feel when you get there.
The overall
impression I got from my previous trips to Montevideo, a city of 2.5-3 million people, was that little had
changed over the 31 years I’d been going back and forth. This time it was different. New construction of apartments and buildings
for businesses was evident near the airport in the Carrasco neighborhood, all
along The Ramblas bordering the Rio de la Plata as we drove into the heart of
the city, and in Pocitos, the neighborhood Elaine and I lived in back in
1999. Occasional new high-rise apartment
buildings are going up in downtown inland from the river. Several of the older buildings downtown are being remodeled and
modernized.
