BUGGIES!!!

We arrived in Colonia around 11am and took a short cabride to the hotel. The hotel is a cute little thing reminiscent of Paraty. 2 story complex, nice little courtyard in the middle. But with nicer rooms. We dropped our stuff off and headed out to get some lunch and see about renting some scooters, quads, or buggys (go carts) for the afternoon. We ate lunch at a little street cafe. I ate a plain grilled (emphasis on plain) chicken breast with mashed potatoes. It was just perfect after the really greasy food of Montevideo. While we were sitting outdoors, Andrew got "shat" on by a bird 3 times and Barbara twice. Andrew has now been "shat" on 4 times on this trip and each time it happens, it's hysterical because he can't believe it keeps happening to him. After lunch, we walked down to the water and colonial sections of the city. It's a beautiful city. You can rent buggies, golf carts, or scooters for $16.75 USD an hour. We got 1 for 2 hours. Andrew and Elizabeth, Tom and Gary, Suzanne and Hannah, and Lydia and Amanda also rented buggies. We all zoomed off following each other for a bit then separating and exploring the city on our own. Justin and I took off down the waterfront at pretty good speeds. We passed quite a few slow moving cars and scooters. I'm guessing on some of the downhills, we hit speeds of 40-45 miles an hour. It was pretty damn fun. Road traffic is minimal, especially on a Sunday so we had little to contend with. When we felt like stopping, we stopped at the futbol stadium and Andrew and I paid 40 pesos to sit and watch the match for a bit while the rest of the gang walked around the local market. It was quite nice though Suzanne and Hannah got backed into by an old man in a little Festiva. Luckily nobody was hurt, just their pride. They were actually more concerned with the buggy because the security deposit was a few thousand pesos.

At 5pm, we returned the buggies and headed across the street to the Colonial portion of the city to take a look at the ruins and some of the old architecture. I'm quite enjoying this city. We stopped for ice cream, coffee, and tea though I didn't have any. It ended up being the most expensive ice cream we've come across so far. 225 Uruguayian Pesos for a gelato sized cup of ice cream. Or about $11.42 USD. To put that into persective, Justin and I ate lunch in Montevideo for 185 pesos COMBINED. My chicken breast and mashed potato lunch earlier in the day was under 200. Still, it was a quite nice afternoon and we still had dinner to look forward to. There was another GAP group again heading the opposite direction that we were going to be meeting so we had that to look forward to as well. Meeting new people is still one of the most appealing parts of travel. I really enjoy it. We ate a few blocks away at a restaurant that had a foozeball table so we got into some heated foozeball games first amongst ourselves (coed teams, then guys vs girls, guys vs guys, girls vs girls, then we invited the other group over and got group vs group games going). It was a good night. I wish we were staying in Colonia a bit longer. I would have loved to see the rest of the city including the bull fighting ring ruins (Andrew and Elizabeth saw it) and just spending a leisurely afternoon here. Instead we are taking a high speed catamaran in the morning to Buenos Aires which really isn't a bad thing. A lot of the group is really looking forward to BA, myself included. Bring on the meat and Argentine red wine!