Just a Small Town Girl

Friday I went to a tango show, which really ended up being live music with one or two dances. Afterwards, I went to a costume party which was a blast. Melissa and I dueled as Power Rangers (you have to get creative when you only brought a suitcase of clothes with you). Surprisingly, the majority of people were able to guess what we were!

Saturday I hung out with Santiago and got to know some of his friends.

On Sunday, we went to the Clasico. This is one of the biggest soccer games of the year. Penarol and Nacional face off (the two biggest teams in Uruguay with a Packer Viking type rivalry), winner gets bragging rights for the season. We sat on the Penarol side which was a good choice, seeing as they won 5-0. This game is usually really dangerous; people have literally been killed leaving the stadium. Thankfully, we didn’t experience any type of violence.

On Monday, my Spanish class went to another museum. It was really pretty.

Wednesday, I went to another museum for my culture class. I swear by the end of the semester I will have been to every museum in the city but that’s pretty cool.

On Thursday I didn’t have class because it was National Workers Day. Literally everything shuts down; there aren’t even busses or taxis. If a job requires you to work, the employer is required to pay double the wages.  Laura, Melissa, Maya, Alex Sweeny (our old roommate from England) and I decided to take advantage of the extra day off. We loaded up the car and headed out to Piriapolis, a small town an hour away from Montevideo. Laura has a friend that owns a house there. We rented it out for the weekend. It was such an amazing time. For 3 days, we were completely disconnected. No internet, no TV, and most of all not a word of English. For 3 days, I didn’t hear, speak, or read an English sentence. It was wonderful.

Piriapolis is one of the only places in Uruguay with a non-flat landscape. There are several hills that you can climb. I didn’t realize just how much I miss the landscape of Wisconsin until I got a little taste of it again. I am really missing just living among nature. I didn’t realize how much it is a part of my everyday life until I’ve had to live without it. Luckily, Montevideo has beaches that have allowed me to appreciate nature’s beauty in a new way but it’s still not the same.

So we got to the house and the gate was locked from the inside. We had no other way to get in other than me climbing the fence and hopping through the barbed wire to the other side. 

Once we got inside the fence, Laura tried to open the door. After trying all the keys and all the doors, she called the owner. Turns out we were at the wrong house and I accidentally broke and entered. Oops..

Along with being immersed in some sort of familiar nature, it was nice to be a more relaxed setting. Don’t get me wrong, I am in love with the city of Montevideo and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but big city life is something that I am not fully used to. I love and have taken advantage of all the amazing opportunities living in a big city presents but I often long for something a little less overwhelming.

I have never really considered myself a small town girl but coming here makes me realize just how much I feel out of place. From little things, like learning how to constantly be aware of all of the traffic in the streets to big things like the culture of a big city, I am constantly reminded.

Although I like, and am getting used to life here, there things that I desperately miss from my little Holmen/Eau Claire. Most of all, I am constantly thankful for the childhood I had growing up where I did. I unknowingly learned an abundance of life skills just by growing up in a small town and around nature.

Another tangent: Not only I am learning a lot about the Uruguayan culture, I am learning so much about my own culture in Wisconsin. By being exposed to another culture so different from my own, I am given a new vantage point on the way we do things in Wisconsin. Things I have never paid attention to like how we great each other or the difference in personal space. Also, I’m learning how different the culture varies from state to state. Melissa (from North Carolina), Maya (born in DC and goes to school in the LA area) and I have talked a lot about the cultural differences between our states. I’ll start talking about a food and they have never heard about it before or a part of my daily routine that they didn’t think people actually did. It’s been a great learning experience. People who say that all Americans are the same are completely wrong. Each state/region hast their own culture and traditions.

I feel like I haven’t adequately explained myself. I am truly fascinated by this topic and would to delve deeper into it with better examples of the types of things I am noticing. Unfortunately, like I mentioned last blog, English is getting harder and harder for me. I find myself struggling to come up the word I am looking for (the other day I forgot the word ‘insult’ for 2 minutes. I kept asking, what the heck do you call the opposite of a compliment?!) or the right way to express my thoughts. This is an extremely uncomfortable and frustrating feeling. Now, I am not able to fully express my thoughts in Spanish or English. It makes me feel a little trapped in my own head. I’m sure it’s just some sort of language learning process that I’ll get over. Hopefully!