It has been almost a week since we landed in Uruguay; and it has been a week filled with new foods, long walks, dangerous intersections, crowded bus rides, and above all- miscommunication.
I'm not sure what I expected to find upon landing in Uruguay, certainly not the crowded urban city that is Montevideo, home to half of the country's 3 million people. However what shocked me more than the pothole filled brick walkways or the street art covered walls, more even than the dangerously uncontrolled intersections: was the language. Why I started this trip with the expectation that it would be easy to find English speaking assistance wherever we went us a mystery even to me -perhaps it was a notion formed from how easy we found it to communicate on our last trip through Thailand. Whatever it was, it was ungrounded.
When we left Canada, my Spanish vocabulary consisted of Hola, gracias,chow and the numbers one through seven. Admittedly, almost all of this was taught to me by Dora the explorer. I also shamefully admit that my vocabulary has not expanded much since our arrival albeit being able to ask for a bathroom. Unfortunately, just about my entire family arrived with more or less the same grasp of the language as I did, which made ordering our first meal (and almost every meal since) a lengthy process filled with hand gestures and fumbling silences. The people of Uruguay, for the most part, seem to know about the same amount of our language as we do theirs, and so our interactions have a tendency to turn into awkward, and very public games of charades. All of this to say that I have never valued the gift of communication so much.
Despite the added time it takes to get just about anything done - from asking for directions to reserving a hostel- we are learning. My dad goes everywhere with his lonely planet Latin America translation guide, and I have become better at being able to decipher what written spanish means (something greatly helped by already being able to speak French). For the most part we are able to get by, or worst case scenario, just go with whatever the outcome may be. Whether that means staying an extra day in a small beach side fishing village when you miss the only bus out (one of today's mishaps); or eating lots of cheese and crackers when you mom accidentally orders 384 pesos worth of cheese (another one of today's events).. That is the beauty of being on a trip as long as ours, we have time to learn and can afford to make mistakes. Some of these mistakes even turn out to be good things- they mean meeting a friendly local who spends a half hour trying to help you find your hostel, or getting to see a wing of a typography museum that's technically closed, or learning about lots of different ways you can cook with cheese.
Tomorrow we will try once again to catch a bus to a small village further down the coast, and then we'll be off to a family owned vegetarian horse ranch. Fingers crossed both places have people good at playing charades. Either way, it's all part of the adventure.
