I JUST GOT BACK FROM LAST WEEK'S TRIP TO MONTEVIDEO

            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.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, III: INTERNATIONAL CUISINE IN URUGUAY MEANS WHAT THEY EAT IN ARGENTINA

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            I’ve mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods.  Meat is salted, but not marinated, before roasting or broiling over the fire.  When we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of almost 3 million inhabitants.  According to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants in town now.  Roma-Tijuana seems to serve Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found.  Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to the Italian-Uruguayan palate.  The salsa was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>.  La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the same web site as the previous restaurant review.

            After Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming.  Fortunately we had by then made friends with several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo.   One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when we admitted to craving Mexican food.  When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine.  “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.  He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large expatriate community.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, II: DON’T WHINE ABOUT THE WINE UNLESS YOU’VE TASTED IT

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A few years ago, I visited Mendoza, the wine production capital of Argentina, accompanied by a colleague from my University's Viticulture and Enology Department who is a V.I.P. in wine tasting circles.  We were invited to taste the better wines from several of the local wineries, two or three tours per day, which was where I first fell in love with Malbec wine as a varietal.  There are a few quirky things I remember from this experience.