Adventures in Uruguay

Hey Everyone!!

Apologies for not blogging for the last three days. From trying to nurse my body back to normal after food poisoning to running around trying to buy a ticket to Uruguay, I have been EXTREMELY busy. Here's a summary of my past three days:

Thursday-Internship Day 2
        Once again I woke up bright and early to head to my second day of interning at Hospital Garrahan. I was wearing my lab coat as a jacket on the way to the bus stop and as I walked down the street a man called out to me and said, "Hola Doctora." Haha! That's the first and only time I'll ever hear that. I guess for now I'll have a Argentine doctor alter ego. Megan and I rode the bus together to Garrahan. We were a little nervous at first because we couldn't remember the exact stop. But luckily there is a huge field with sketchy circus tents right next to the hospital where we are supposed to stop so it was not too hard to find.
        When we first arrived at the hospital we met with Dr. Bes and his supervisor, a doctor with an complicated Italian last name that I have since forgotten. I didn't care for the supervisor. He was your stereotypical pretentious doctor. He told me that he thought that I was from Colombia because I have dreads (wrong and wrong) -_____- The interns discussed our career goals and what we wanted and hoped to experience during our internship. Dr. Bes told us that today we would be spending the day with Social Services, but next week he would try to set me up with a fonoaudiologo (AKA a speech pathologist!!!!!!!! Rahhh!!!!). After that we headed down to social services to meet with some of the staff in that department.

Teatro Colon

       Two workers in the social services department spoke with us about their jobs. We spoke about how social services is involved in both emergency services and internal care at the hospital. We also learned that because Hospital Garrahan is a free hospital (which provides services to anyone regardless of if they are an Argentine citizen), social services plays a large role in relaying many of the free services to both patients and their families. For example, social services has a clothing drive where they provide clothing to family members, who may have quickly ran out of their houses without a jacket to take their child to the hospital. Social services also directly takes matters into their own hands in cases of physical abuse. They hire lawyers to resolve the problems with the families of the patients. We also toured two hospitality homes, La Casa de Garrahan and La Casa de Ronald McDonald. La Casa de Garrahan is a home where mothers and patients can stay during a patient's stay in the hospital. They have bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens where the mothers can cook, computer labs and a library where the patients can attend class with private tutors, and a playground where siblings can play. The Ronald McDonald House at Hospital Garrahan is very different from other hospitals as it is located directly inside of the hospital. The Ronald McDonald house is reserved for mothers (and in special circumstances fathers) of children who are receiving intensive therapy. After my internship we ate at a little restaurant that was about a block from UP and ate empanadas before going to my literature class. My lit class was boring and I fought to stay awake.

Teatro Colon

        That evening a group of us went to the historic Teatro Colon to watch a performance by La Oquestra Filharmonica de Buenos Aires. Teatro Colon is probably one of the most beautiful buildings that I have ever been to in my entire life. The area surrounding Teatro Colon, known as Tribunales, is also beautiful. Tribunales is home to Argentina's Supreme Court and many other important buildings. I plan to come back to this area one morning before my class to explore. But back to the Filharmonica....the show was great. It brought me back to my band days and made me remember how pensive classical music makes me. I thought of practicing my clarinet and how my mind would just wander. I took sooo many pictures of the Teatro Colon so make sure to check out my facebook page to see them (:
       When I came home from the Orchestra, Claudia had made me a dish (which I forget the name of) that had a squash, which tastes very similar to sweet potato, on top of beef. It was delicious, but my stomach was still irritating me so I couldn't eat it all. After that I was off to bed!

Friday-To hell and back
        A group of us decided that we would take a boat to Uruguay on Saturday. Because of the food poisoning, my week was thrown off and I was unable to buy a ticket right away like the rest of the group. Luckily I wasn't the only one who hadn't bought my ticket so I planned to meet a group of my friends at 8:30 Friday morning, buy the ticket, come back and go to sleep, then go back out to run some errands and eat lunch before class started. When I met with my friends at 8:30 things seemed to be going great. We caught a bus and made our way to the travel agency. However, it turned out the the travel agency, which we thought opened at 9, didn't open until 10. Some of my friends had to go to class, so the rest of us sat in a cafe until the travel agency opened. I ordered cafe con leche (coffee and milk), 3 medialunas, and it came with a small glass of orange juice. Let me just say that Argentina's orange juice gives Florida's orange juice a run for its money...delicious. Anyway, 10 am comes and the travel agency opens up...our friends who had bought their tickets told us that they had paid 680 pesos (about $85 dollars). However, because we had waited until Friday to buy our tickets the price had gone up to 860 pesos (a little over $100 dollars). We all only had 680 so we had to walk back to our apartments (which was about a 30 minute walk), go exchange dollars for pesos and come back. By this time it was 11:30 and I had class at 1:30. When we finally trekked back to the travel agency, the server crashed and the man who had helped us told us he couldn't confirm our trip.       -__- When the server finally came back, half of our group had to pay an extra 100 pesos because first class tickets were the only ones available. After over an hour and a half, the travel agency could not print our tickets and we left with a receipt and a prayer that the server would work again and that we would be e-mailed our tickets. If not, we would have to return the next day to get a refund and we wouldn't be able to go to Uruguay. To top it off, we didn't leave the travel agency until 1:30 (the time my class started) and we were 30 minutes late to class. Needless to say I was not happy. The fiasco at the travel agency had thrown off my entire day. I still had so many errands to run before the stores closed on Friday and I was starving because I had not been able to eat lunch.
            That night Claudia made us a delicious meal. She made us fish (I cannot remember the name, but it is a very popular fish dish) with onions and fresh lemon served on top and rice that was cooked with olive oil and mushrooms. I usually hate mushrooms, but those were delicious. That meal kind of made up for my crappy day. After dinner we watched Life of Pi. I really enjoyed the scenery and the incorporation of so many different religions..."Faith is a house with many rooms and doubt on every floor. But faith is useful, it keeps faith a living thing." Claudia didn't like it as much. She tried to explain why, but I got lost in translation. Oh well! Kassidy and I stayed in tonight. We had to wake up early.

Today- Uruguay
        Luckily everything worked out with our tickets and we were able to go to Uruguay. We woke up very early this morning. We had to be at Puerto Madero at 7:30 to board our boat to Uruguay. The boat station (known as the buquebus station) was very similar to a mini airport. You had to go through customs and have your bags checked etc. The buquebus (the boat that we rode to Uruguay on) itself was a large ferry like boat, but the inside was set up like a luxurious plane. Because of the name buquebus and the fact that the buquebus station was like an airport, we all kept calling the buqbus "the bus" or "the plane" instead of the boat. LOL! After a 45 minute boat ride we made it to Colonia. 
        At the Uruguayan buquebus station we exchanged our money. It was a better deal to exchange our American money rather than our Argentine pesos as one US Dollar was worth 20 Uruguayan pesos and one Argentine peso was worth about 5 Uruguayan pesos. I only had to exchange $20 to have enough to pay for the entire day and all my souvenirs. We were a little lost at first but we found a tourist center with maps and hit the ground running. Colonia  is a picturesque small old city. It was very quiet and quaint. When you first walk over the bridge that leads you to the city, you are taken into an old fort that looks out onto the beach. Then you're lead into cobble stone streets with pastel painted stucco buildings that have lamps hanging from them. They were ideal for picture taking. There are also lots of antique cars there. The cobblestone streets and old cars kind of reminded me of Cuba. There were about 15 of us who came on this trip and we kind of split into two groups: one was eager to explore and the other was eager to take pictures. I split my time between the two groups, but ultimately ended up with the one that wanted to take pictures :) We were literally having photo shoots everywhere. So much fun! We split our photos up between cameras so we wouldn't have a million copies of the same picture. I'm anxious to see the other pictures. 

Uruguayan Chajá! 

        After exploring for a while we stopped to eat at a restaurant. After yesterday's lovely experience (*sarcasm), we learned that part of the reason as to why we had paid so much for our ticket to Uruguay was because we had booked through a travel agency. The other people in our group who had bought their tickets cheaper had bought them from a Buquebus store. However, the difference in price ended up working out in our favor as our ticket came with a meal voucher for lunch that included a three course meal.  For my appetizer I had Mayonesa de Ave...a potato salad with chicken. I was a little worried about the mayonaise in the potato salad but the restaurant that we ate at had excellent reviews on trip advisor so I took my chances. It was delicious. Next I had chicken with french fries and ketchup. It was just enough to satisfy my cravings for American food. Then for dessert I ate Chajá, which was probably one of the best things I've had since I've been here. It was very similar to Tiramisu minus the coffee. It was a light soaked cake with a cream layer, a layer of peaches and confectioner's sugar and chocolate sprinkled on the outside. Yum, yum, yum! Our waiter had a very interesting Uruguayan accent. When he said de nada, he would say de naaaa and he would trail off at the end as if he had been running and was out of breath. The Uruguayan accent is slightly harder to understand, but if you just concentrate on what the person is saying it's not too bad. My meal was excellent & to make it even better I only had to pay $3 for my drinks. In the end, the food money that our voucher paid for was equal to the difference in our ticket price and the ticket price that the other people in our group made. All the hassle from yesterday was worth it.
          After lunch we continued to explore. On our way out of the restaurant we passed another restaurant that had a live band in the front. They were singing Amy Winehouse with a Spanish accent. This definitely made my day. A group headed up into the lighthouse...I chose not to go. We headed into the downtown area of Colonia, which was comparable in size to broad street in Athens. We stopped at a couple of stores and some of us stopped to get money from ATMs that distributed American dollars. I decided to be glutinous and have two desserts. We shopped at a gelato shop. I had dulce de leche gelato that had little specks of chocolate in it. It was delicious! 

           After icecream we headed to a flea market to buy souvenirs. This man called me over to ask where our group was from. He asked me if we were models! Haha! Our group got a lot of attention yesterday. Lots of stares and people talking about us. 
         After the flea market, we started to head back in the direction of the buquebus station, but we still had lots of time to spare. We stopped at several spots along the way to take pictures. One area allowed us to walk along the beach. The beach was a beach...nothing spectacular. But there were rowers and you could see the dock off in the distance so it made for a pretty picture. The next spot that we stopped at was a grassy field with a giant chimenea that had a great view of the dock and the boats that were tied to it. We sat in the field and a stray dog that had been following us laid down in the field next to us. LOL It was kind of like our little Uruguayan pet. We were trying to talk to it in Spanish, but I guess sometimes our accents were too thick for it to understand. :) Finally we went to the dock, which was scary because it had big slits between the boards that a dropped camera or phone could easily slip down into. We spent our last hour and a half sitting on rockers and furniture outside of a convenience store. Several of our group members still had Uruguayans pesos left over that they had to spend so they bought wine and drank it while we waited for the bus. 
       On the way home, we were all exhausted and delirious. So exhausted and delirious that none of us could even fall asleep. Instead we were all sitting on the buquebus laughing at absolutely nothing and being silly. I know we were entertaining to the Argentines that were sitting with us on the boat. They were all staring at us and laughing at us. One man even had his wife pose with us so that he could take a picture on his iPad. LOL! When we got back to Argentina it was dinner time (10pm), Kassidy and I went to eat at the Alto Palermo mall. There were so many people out on the streets (Buenos Aires really looks like New York at night) and it was really hard to find a table. When we got back to the apartment, I was supposed to go out with our friends but I was so exhausted. I tried to finish this post last night, but I was just too exhausted. Be on the lookout for another post today! I will be talking about my adventures in Buenos Aires' Chinatown.

Besos y Abrazos,

Jackie