uruguay beach weekend

ok, i'm trying to catch up on some good stuff that I've neglected to write about in the past few months... In October we took a nice chill weekend at the beach. Mike had a day off from work for "Virgin Day" or something like that. Argentina has so many national holidays. Julia invited us to come to Uruguay with her; we took a ferry across the river to Uruguay, arrived in Colonia and got right on a bus to Montevideo. I'd been napping on the ferry and was still totally groggy when we walked out into the terminal; I immediately crashed straight into a giant pole (it was painted white and everything in the room was white, i didn't see it!) it hurt so bad and it scared the bejeezus out of me, i was so groggy and confused I spontaneously burst into tears and then i felt very embarrassed about a) being clumsy/oblivious and b) crying like a baby, but luckily nobody seemed to notice, or at least nobody pointed and laughed at me. We got into Montevideo around 10 or 11 pm and met up with Julia's friends Eugenia and Antonella. We ate some dinner in Montevideo and then took another bus, headed north up the coast, around 1 am! An hour or two later we asked the bus driver to drop us on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere around 2 or 3 am. It was beautifully cool and quiet and deserted and dark. We walked about twenty minutes, through a tiny seaside town, to get to the rental house next to the ocean. Dropped off our backpacks and walked on out to the moonlit beach!
The town is called La Tuna, somewhere between Montevideo and Punta del Este, where the brown Rio Plata water mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean.

........So we spent a few days chilling and doing nothing, walking on the beach and reading and drawing. The beach was really quiet, just a few fishermen and occasional families playing in the sand. I jumped in the water once and it was super chilly! I guess Uruguay in October is about like Maine in June...
Antonella staged a video shoot on the beach, lots of her friends came out for the afternoon and they acted out some kind of live-action Super Mario video art with lots of jumping in the sand dunes. Then we had a typical giant asado, lots of beef and sausages, crusty bread and fresh salad. They had these delicious sweet blood sausages that tasted like fruit and cinnamon! Usually blood sausages are too creepy for me to eat (they're called morcilla here) but these ones were just so tasty, I couldn't get enough. We made lemon squares for dessert.
After a big thunderstorm the sun peeked out through the clouds and there was this amazing light on the wet deserted beach.
Muchissimas gracias a Antonella, Eugenia y Julia para invitarnos!