MARCH 30 "I'm on a ... roof?"

After a quick breakfast, Ronnie, Scott, Stephen and I headed to Casa ACU. I started the day filming the Advanced Spanish class. The professor is a local Uruguayan and she is a mirror image of the seamstress in the movie, "The Incredibles." When I first walked in to film she asked me (in spanish), "Are you here to film the pretty girls? You are? OK, I'll leave," and she proceeded to hide behind the marker board. Funny lady!

Advanced Spanish was followed by lunch cooked by Roquelle and Mariella. They made a traditional Uruguayan end-of-the-month meal called gnocchi. You eat it at the end of the month because by then you're supposed to be low on funds and need to eat something cheap, yet filling. It was great!

After Lunch I went upstairs to shoot Dr. Shelly Sanders' Literature class. It was a rather un-eventful, typical Study Abroad class until one of the students fell asleep. While it's bad enough to fall asleep in a small class, it's even worse when you're sitting right next to your teacher! That's right, one of the students fell asleep sitting right next to Dr. Sanders. Needless to say she was woken up and a fun laugh was shared by all.

After filming Dr. Sanders' class, Ronnie, Scott, Stephen and I caught a bus to the "old town." The bus ride cost a mere 75 cents each! When we got to the old town we wandered through a few markets selling street art and Mates (more on Matas in a later blog). Stephen was a fantastic tour guide explaining the history of the town and the different buildings and monuments we saw. The most memorable was a HUGE monument erected to mark the tomb of Artigas. Above ground all there is is a large marble statue of a man on a horse, but follow the stairs underground and you walk into a dimly lit room roughly 100' x 100' with nothing in it but an Urn, highlighted by a single beam of light from the ceiling. On either side is an armed guard, a la the guys with the big fuzzy hats in England. No movement, no facial expressions, nothing. Talk about a boring job!

After walking around town we caught a cab back to Casa ACU to film some of Wimon Walker's class. It's the only class that every student is enrolled in so it was a good filming opportunity to catch all the students in one place. Back to the cab ride, though. After riding in several taxi's in Uruguay, all I can really say is video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you speed around a city with no regard for laws or other traffic, are quite about accurate. In Uruguay, green lights don't mean go. The light for the cross traffic turning Yellow means "go ahead and go." Lanes? What are lanes? There's no stripes painted in the road, apparently you just guess how many cars can fit across the road and figure it out from there. I grabbed the door grip more than one time on a few of today's rides! Definitely an experience I won't soon forget! I'll try to video a cab ride before we leave.

After Wimon's class I went to the roof with Ronnie, and Scott to get some scenic shots of Montevideo. While Ronnie shot various students conversing on the roof, I set up a time-lapse of the sunset over the city for about an hour. During that hour I had a lengthy conversation with a Basset Hound down below (lots of howling back and forth!), and I learned that when bored, an empty, plastic 20oz Coke bottle actually makes a very comfortable pillow. I'll upload the time-lapse video at the end of today's blog.

Dinner was a great experience! Ronnie, Scott, Stephen, the Sanders, the Walkers and I went across town to a restaurant called Teracotta. However, Terractta was closed on Mondays so we walked a little ways down the street and found a small restaurant called "Taco Muñoz." The host/waiter/cook (only one person owned and ran the place) was named Ruben "Taco" Muñoz and he was a riot! He kept making jokes and definitely made the meal entertaining as well as delicious. He told us about his life, how he spent 30 years in Argentina learning to cook before coming to Uruguay and how he's had this restaurant for a little over 4 years. The food was excellent and the service was even better. Definitely one of the best dining experiences of my life. On top of that, it was CHEAP! I hope to make a return visit before we leave for Buenos Aires later in the week.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of what went on today (it was BUSY), but hopefully this is enough for those of you who care to know what I'm getting to experience!

Until tomorrow!

Oh, here's that sunset I told you about...

Here's a summary of what I shot on Day 2.