Jan 16, 2005
On the Argentine side of the border, two apparently drunk border guards just waved me through, ignoring the piece of paper I was told to surrender when I leave the country. The Uruguaians are a little more thorough, if you define thorough as the application of stamps to paper, and it took a total of five stamps on a little piece of pink paper and two in my passport, from four different windows and a guy who asks if you have any fruit or milk before I could enter the country.
They love their stamps down here.
Uruguay is remarkably well groomed. The sides of the roads and in the medians are kept short, and the roads are neat and well paved.Mercedes is 20 miles from the border, and a little rundown but still well kept up. The favored mode of transport appears to be 50cc scooters and motorcycles, and it is not uncommon to see a family of four on one, scooting around town. Lots of girls ride them in shorts,and of course nobody has a helmet.
Yesterday I went on a scenic tour of Buenos Aires, and it is a remarkable place, very clean, spacious, and gregarious. I rode on both the longest and the widest avenues in the world, and looked across the widest river in the world, separating Buenos Aires andUruguay. There is nothing more entertaining to be done in Argentina than slipping up and referring to the Falkland Islands. At least twice a day you can get a rise out of someone, usually the same person. There is a beautiful tower in the middle of Buenos Aires built by the English community several decades ago that used to be called the English Tower, but during the war it was officially renamed as a monument to the army. Sound familiar?
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