Montevideo & Heaven on Earth

A big statue....
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After 51 hours of travel by bus, ferry and bus again we arrived in Montevideo and had a much deserved shower.

Went for a wander around the city and found it to be pretty nice although virtually deserted as everyone goes to various nearby beaches on the weekends.

As it just so happened to be Australia Day we did what any decent Australians would do.....we wandered around the city trying to find other Aussies to hit the piss with, having no luck with that we decided to lower our standards to just anyone who had heard of Australia but still no success, ended up just the two of us sitting in a virtually deserted Irish pub for a couple of hours before heading home....disappointing.

Sensory overload
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The next day we headed down to a place called Mercado Del Puerto which just so happens to be heaven on earth!  It is basically a big market full of BBQ meat places set up like bars in a pub as well as heaps of steak restaurants.  We walked into the place and I almost had a brain melt down from sensory overload, I believe Jo described me as "like a kid in a candy store...on speed". Eventually settled on a place sat up at the bar and chose bits of meat off the grill, which was a tough choice as it was all brilliant..would even go out on a limb here and say the steaks in Uruguay are better than Argentina's.  Needless to say we went back at every opportunity.

The meat market
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Other than that had a pretty quiet time, Jo had a sandle blow out in the main street which between myself, a homeless guy and a nearby restaurant owner we managed to fix with a nail and a paper clip..the homeless guy only charging a small fee for his efforts.  She then proceeded to come with in about a foot of stepping on a dead rat (or small dog, it was pretty big) I warned her at the last minute and she proceeded to do a fair imitation of Riverdance to get away from it...much to the amusement of the few locals still in town.