Hi everyone!

Here I am on the road again! La Pedrera, Uruguay, to be exact. ¿Why Uruguay?, everyone keeps asking me. I guess I´m still trying to figure that one out, too. Because my standby passes would only take me to Uruguay, Brasil or Argentina, for one, so I can fly into Uruguay and out of Argentina. But beyond that, because everything I read about it sounded really nice, and they speak Spanish here (one of my primary reasons for coming south), and besides, nobody goes to Uruguay. I was curious.
It’s been great so far. The people are really nice, the days are long, the beaches are beautiful, the mood is relaxed. I can drink the tap water and nobody tries to rob me or convince me to buy their goods. Things are organized, clean, and the price is the price regardless of your accent or skin color. It’s not that I like it better than Central America. It’s just different. And comfortable, which is good for me right now.
Ok, so here’s a picture for you: A waiter pours a bottle of wine into a pitcher full of sliced fruit at the dinner table of one of the many busy outdoor restaurants. Kids wander by, their eyes as bright as the cotton candy they gleefully nibble on. The open-air market bustles with the activity at a hundred tiny booths with a thousand well-made crafts. Open glass doors flaunt the attire of stylish boutiques to sidewalks of packed people, wandering slowly, as polished and groomed as if coming from a Hollywood movie set. Music thumps from the cars of young people stopped in the unmoving traffic.
What’s unusual about this scene? For one, it’s well past midnight. They say New York is the city that never sleeps. "They" should come to Punto del Este, Uruguay in the summertime. I’m really not sure when people sleep. Siesta, I guess. They go out to dinner at 10 or 11pm, and start -yes, start- to go out for the night no earlier than 1:30. The clubs are packed all night long.
Nobody gives me a second glance. Despite my lack of polishing, I blend right in. Like me, the people here are almost entirely of European ancestry, primarily Italian. The indigenous people didn’t fare so well in this part of the world. I hear Spanish and Portuguese spoken around me. Not a word of English. I am well off the NortAmericano tourist track. This is the Argentinean-Brasilian-Uruguayan tourist track. There are more Argentine license plates in the parking lot than Uruguayan.
It’s not my scene, really, the glamour and money. But it’s fascinating, and I have a good time wandering. And the beaches! I had the best swim in the ocean I’ve had in years. I spent 2 days in Punto del Este before my host, Leo, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend in San Francisco, dropped me off with his friends in a town he thought would be more my style.
Cabo Polonio is about as different from Punto del Este as two places so close can be. You can’t drive there; the only way to find it is to get a half-hour ride in one of these huge off-road trucks over a few miles of sand dunes. The town itself is a bit surreal. For the most part, there are no roads, yards, fences, or vehicles, just a bunch of tiny houses scattered randomly on grass-covered sand dunes. There is no electricity, although a few places have generators. The "main street" is a sand path lined with little outdoor cafes and food stands, grocery stores, clothing and accessory stands, and semi-grungy-looking young people playing music or selling their handicrafts. The beaches are packed (when the wind and rain lets up) with families taking their summer vacation, couples having a romantic getaway, and young travelers. Apparently it is a ghost town in the winter.
A few days into my travels, I started to feel a bit of a sore throat from all the travel, strange foods, odd hours, wind and rain, etc. Before going to sleep my first night in Polonio, I created a visualization of me totally healthy and standing in the sun under a blue sky. I woke up the next morning to the same howling wind and sporadic rain, with the same sore throat. Shortly after yoga, a 69-year-old friend of the couple I’m staying with comes by, and we hit it off. He knows how to speak Spanish slowly, so I can understand, and offers to take me on a tour of the beaches and caves. I happily accept, and along the way it comes up that I may be catching a bit of a cold. It starts raining, and we duck into a cave to wait it out. It turns out that he is very skilled with reflexology and acupressure, and gives me a full treatment. When he is finished, I feel great and lo and behold! We step outside and the sun in shining down from a perfectly clear blue sky! Magic!
So off I go now, after a couple days in another beautiful little beach town, this one with electricity, back to Montevideo, the capital. I hope you’re all enjoying the magic of wherever you are.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Tell someone you love them!

I love you,
asha
p.s. Nobody has trouble with the "sh" sound here, so I’m not "Ax" anymore!