Welcome to the good life!: Day 2 December 27th

Holy cow. I slept so good last night. It was nice to sleep in a bed and not a small airplane seat. Diego’s Sister Natalia and our BIL were nice enough to let us use their bed while we are here. That’s good because if we had to sleep in a small bed I would have made Diego sleep on the floor! : ) We did not go to bed until about Midnight because we stayed up and ate the yummy pizza Martin made for us!

We slept for twelve hours! It has been years since I have done that. I woke up with mosquito bites all over one of my legs. I guess that’s what I get for using really good smelling lotion before I went to bed! I decided to try an experiment; I really wanted to know how my straight hair would survive. I turned on my straightener and blow dried my hair. There is so much damn humidity in the air that my straightner was steaming without even being near my hair! My hair looked good for about half an hour, until I ventured outside. I pulled it up in to a pony and freaking used a whole bottle of hairspray to make it slick back. The front started curling and I knew I was in trouble. There is no way my hair was going to stay straight for more than ten minutes in this place! That’s what hats are for right???

Natalia told me that they have a swap meet in the streets below her house and that is where they get all their fruit and veggies. I decided I just had to see this for myself. I got myself all covered in my SPF 60 and we headed out. It was just like a little Tijuana. Vendors everywhere! There was fruit, meat, cheese, knock off clothes, {Nike, Adidas, Fox, Puma, Ray Ban, you name it} hair accessories, Mate cups, jewelry, and tons of play station 2 video games. They even had original Nintendo games! {I did not take my camera because Diego says they would follow me home if they saw my nice camera!} I was in love. We walked the whole thing and found the answer to my hair dilemmas. Headbands! I bought 5 of them in a bunch of colors and hopefully that will hide my fly-away hair while we are here! We were gone so long that Diego was going to go look for us.

When we got back Martin taught me how to bake milenesas instead of deep fat fry them. They really do taste the same, but way less greasy than the alternative. Can’t wait to make them when I get home!

We then went to la playa {the beach} in Montevideo. Since it was Sunday it was packed but we found a place for our chairs and hung out for a couple hours. It was fun to people watch. It is very different here than in America. Nobody cares what anybody else thinks about then or what they are wearing, they are just trying to have a good time.

We cleaned up and headed to an ice cream shop in town, it was weird to not know many of the choices of ice cream. But they were all so yummy looking that I tried three different flavors. The big thing here is dulce de leche .{caramel} It is mixed with every flavor known to man. It was delish!