Bronwyn in Montevideo

Hi everyone. This is Bronwyn again. My wonderful parents bug me all the time about blogging, but (as you probably noticed during my last blog) I have zero blogging skills. I wish I could just be as creative as Ansley with blogging (as you probably noticed during her last blog), but basically I only talk about the most important stuff. Well, I'm 16 and go to a different school than Ans where, unlike her, I take Spanish. I have been taking Spanish since we moved here, and every year my teacher would talk about us taking a trip to one of our Spanish speaking neighboring countries. But it never happened, because of the school not getting organized... until last year. Last year our class did a program with another school in Uruguay. They came to Porto Alegre and stayed in our houses (I had three girls stay here) and we went to Salto, Uruguay and stayed in their houses. Salto is a very very small town basically in the middle of nowhere. But this year, our class went to Montevideo, Uruguay, the capital. To get there, you have to take a bus ride. We stayed in the bus from 1 in the afternoon until 3 in the morning. When we got to the hotel, at 3 a.m., we discovered that there had been a communication problem and our rooms would only be ready after lunch. So we had until 8 to "sleep" on the bus. Normally, you wouldn't think that that would be a problem, but when you are on a bus for 14 hours with 29 other kids, you don't exactly get any sleep. At 8:00 we had to get ready, eat breakfast and go on a tour of the city to kill time with basically 0 hours of sleep. So, I would tell you all about the history of the city, but I don't really remember.

This a picture of me and my best friends in front of a marble palace. We were kind of tired.

This is most of my class that went. Some stayed in the bus to sleep.

This is the oldest official soccer stadium in Uruguay and maybe in South America (I don't remember). It is called Estádio Centenário and was built for the first ever world cup. Uruguay won. After the tour, we got a chance to catch up on our sleep. The next day, we went to a Uruguaian school. At school, we divided into groups and went into different classes. My group had music class, chemistry and P.E. This is our whole class at the school.

On Saturday, we went to a place called Colônia de Sacramento. It's an old place where catholic priests used to build homes for indians. Now it's just ruins, but you can tell that it was very very beautiful. The first picture is of one of the older houses. The second one is of my friends and I on the "beach".
On Sunday, we went to the Mercado del Puerto, which is like a public market. There, they cook the most traditional dish in Uruguay. It is called parrillada. They basically cook all this meat and put parts of it on a plate. Notice the pig in the upper right corner.

These are pictures at the end of the week of the room I shared with 7 other girls . Our excuse was that we were just too tired to clean.

We did a lot of other stuff like going to the mall, walking around the city in little groups, eating lots of food, celebrating a 15th birthday, etc. On Monday, we started off on our long trip home, stopping on the border of Brasil and Uruguay to go shopping. As you can see, we were very disappointed about that.

We had a lot of fun and for next year, we are already making plans to go to Chile or Mexico.