Montevideo – Survival of the fittest!
 

And there goes my second week here in beautiful Montevideo, hardly leaving me any time to fully recover from last week´s experiences and adventures, pacing on as if nothing had happened and always awaiting me with new and sometimes bigger challenges. So after having tasted to a very small extent of Uruguay´s diversity, I was able to take some bigger bites of it´s beauty and distinctiveness this week, savoring it step by step and one day at a time =)

El parque Rodo

At first, my quest has come to and, although not the one for the Holy Grail, but nevertheless very important to me, the quest for housing, living or simply a place to stay! After many days of searching and waiting, much effort and a lot of weird feelings (it does feel weird not having a place to stay, and not knowing where you are gonna sleep tonight^^), I finally found a place to stay with a new friend I made named Gonzalo and 6 other guys form the church, that share a flat together. They are all very nice and patient with my Spanish, but it´s getting better (that´s at least what they say …), but of course it´s not the same standard that I was used to in Germany, what a surprise^^, but it is decent, not too expensive and already is and will be very performance enhancing for my Spanish. Only inconvenience is the weak Wi-Fi-connection and the cleanliness at the apartment, other than that a great place with a bunch of pretty great guys!



La Ciudad Vieja por la noche (Towncenter at night)

My Spanish intensive course came to an end last Friday and we all had our final test, which was okay, but will be of no relevance for us anyway, it´s mostly for all the other foreign students, who haven´t taken the course, in order to evaluate their Spanish. I will definitely miss my funny, crazy Grandma like Spanish Professor with her great stories, e.g. her car got stolen and dumped in a jungle like swamp somewhere in el interior (entire Uruguay, except Montevideo) completely stripped down to the bones and even the police where afraid to go there, plus she didn´t even have insurance!!! Another crazy story happened (without intending to scare anyone): one of our exchange student friends woke up one morning and there were two guys with knifes standing in her room, stealing money, laptop, camera, iPod … but after begging them to leave the hard-drive, they were nice and did so. . . Just to let you know, I personally feel very safe here and never encountered any problems … so far!

Horse Carrige for waste disposal/collecting purposes

So besides the language classes and studying this week’s main focus was … partying!!! I seriously got invited to 4 birthday and 1 bachelor party! Hahaha pretty good for one week … I couldn´t attend all of them, but here are some of the pictures: and yeah, one birthday was Felix, el gato and some other friends down here. The bachelor party was of one the guys I live with as he´s gonna get married in 2 weeks!!! It was really great fun and people down here are very nice and accommodating!

Chivitos with my room mate Gonzalo

 

So yeah maybe some explanations regarding food down here: I mentioned that Uruguay will probably never be renowned for its haute cuisine, nevertheless they have some pretty tasty dishes here (and I hope I will discover some more!!!). But generally speaking food is not only really expensive in comparison to their incomes, but also quite unhealthy: Burgers, Fries, Hotdogs, meat … or variations thereof. The first picture shows a meal called Chivitos, basically a thin steak (Schnitzel) with ham and cheese, on a pile of fries and often some kind of potato salad, topped with some veggies, either as sandwich or al plato and an egg sunny side up. As I said, pretty tasty, but rather unhealthy! The next picture probably shows my favorite meal so far: Uruguayan Barbecue Plate for 2!!! Lots of different kind of meat and a great variety of baked or grilled veggie were a real treat and portions here (as you may see) are rather huge!!!

The Huge Barbecue Plate

 

Enough of food! We also had our first almost real University experience (the real real one will be next week, as lectures start tomorrow!) as we had all our info meetings for exchange students and the different faculty presentations, of course all in Spanish! But it was very informative and now we have to choose our classes and that´s gonna be very exciting. So far I will probably take 6 classes, 3 exchange student classes, namely Advanced Spanish, Uruguayan Culture, and Community Service (I´m very excited for that one, because we will also get to know the other parts of Uruguay, that we normally wouldn´t) and 3 normal classes, Industrial Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Negotiation Techniques. So I am really excited for next week, although I know that it´s gonna be more than super tough probably for the entire first month, because I wouldn´t understand 10 % of the words, if it all was in German, well and it´s gonna be in Spanish, so I will have to live of the 10 % that I do understand … :P

Kids playing in "some kind" of sand pit

I´ve been to the temple again this week, and it was beautiful and inspiring as every time, I´ve seen a street rock concert right on main street and a street basketball tournament and we all started to make plans for our trips around here, as we will have an entire week of for Easter! So I still love it here, although sometimes (yesterday) felt like 100% humidity!!!, but at least it´s nice and warm, although we just entered in the winter time! And I really enjoyed skyping with a part of my family!

My University from the sun deck

 

Inspirational thought of the week: I can´t remember how we started talking about it, but we were talking about the purpose and sense in life with some fellow students, and as so often it is not easy to find an answer to that question, but my fellow student didn´t know why she was here, so I asked if she was looking for the answer or the purpose … Well, at least, if I didn´t know the why to (my) life, I would start looking for that answer, because I know that there is an answer . . . maybe you should start searching too . . .

My new address (as I would be more than delighted to receive postcards, letters, or packages^^) is:

Sebastian Zacherl

Mercedes 1188, Apt. 101

Montevideo 11100, Uruguay

I love and miss all of you, be safe and see you again next week!