Happy November everyone! I know some friends in Colorado and Montana saw a bunch of snow this week. ❄️☃️ I hope everyone is staying warm and adjusting to daylight savings!

It’s getting progressively warmer here and one day while walking along the waterfront, I saw a big group of kite surfers! They’ve also painted the Montevideo sign twice in the last 2 weeks. This week it’s pink to honor breast cancer survivors.💕

Class Field Trips!

One of the neat things about our school program is that the staff have really emphasized exploring the city and getting involved/attending events. ☺️ In almost all of my classes, the professors have suggested neat places to visit or recommended different types of food, coffee and restaurants. Every Friday, we get a message from the organizer detailing all of the weekend’s events so that we can check them out. 📆

Field trips have also been common in almost all of my classes, but especially in the Spanish ones. From going to bakeries/markets to learn about and practice ordering items in Spanish, to checking out unique stores in the city, it has been a really valuable and fun experience. Last week, my Spanish professor took us on a downtown walking tour to see the city from a pretty viewpoint, to learn about a neat bookstore and most importantly, to stop at a delicious local ice cream parlor. My other Spanish class introduced us to a neat market that has dried fruit, nuts and snacks in bins and is way cheaper than buying similar snacks in the regular grocery stores. 🍨

Cat Cafe ☕️🐈

One of my classmates found a cute cat cafe not far from school and so a few of us visited one day after class last week. It was surprisingly cozy and they also serve delicious milkshakes, coffee and desserts! 😋

Librerías de las noches 📚

The city had a neat event last night called ‘bookstores of the night’ where bookstores around the city were open late, hosted live music and food trucks outside on the street and had lots of discounts. We only walked to about 5 different bookstores, but it was lively and interesting. One used bookstore in particular was so full of books all stacked everywhere, it felt like a fire hazard! 🤣

Tragedia/Milagros de Los Andes ✈️

Are any of you familiar with the Uruguayan flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972? Netflix has a really excellent movie about the crash called The Society of Snow, which I highly recommend. There is also an interesting season about the incident on the podcast Against the Odds.

I had to do a presentation about the crash in one of my Spanish classes and found it to be a remarkable story. Forty five passengers went down while flying from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile in 1972 due to a storm and some confusion about their location. The plane crashed and the passengers were lost for 72 days! Several died during the crash and more afterward due to injuries, illness, hypothermia, and horribly, an avalanche that hit the plane several weeks after the crash. Amazingly, 2 of the survivors were able to hike out of the Andes and found help in Chile but before they could, the group was forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. Montevideo has a neat museum about the incident and I was able to visit. It was really moving and lovely. ❤️

Unexpected Doctor’s Visit 👩🏻‍⚕️

Due to an accidental exposure to perfume and then sun screen 😬, I developed a contact dermatitis rash on my chest and neck this week and after 3-4 days, it got progressively worse. If I had been in the U.S. I would have just run to the convenience store and bought some over the counter topical hydrocortisone cream and treated it myself. However, in Uruguay, medicated topical creams are not available over the counter and so I felt resigned to seek medical care. 😖 I was worried that it would take a few days to get an appointment and so when I had a 5 minute break in one of my classes, I texted the program organizer to tell him that I needed to see a doctor. Surprisingly, he wrote back immediately, saying “sure, do you want to go now?”. I had not expected this and so I had to admit that I was still in class for another hour! 😆 But afterward, we walked first to a pharmacy to see if they would sell a topical steroid cream, which they didn’t. So then we walked one block further to a medical clinic and I was able to see a doctor within 20 minutes! 🎉

She gave me 2 different prescriptions with just the name of the drug and no directions. She also wrote the prescriptions with my middle and last name, rather than my first name. When I pointed this out to the program organizer, he said it didn’t matter. 😂

So we walked back to the pharmacy and it took less than 2 minutes before they handed me a bag with 2 boxes in it. One was for a topical steroid cream and the other for an oral steroid pill. Neither had any directions, stickers, or my name on them. If I had not been paying attention to the doctor’s directions, it would have been confusing because they gave me 10 more oral pills than I needed. It was so interesting experiencing health care in another country! The pharmacy process especially was really different than how pharmacies work in the U.S.. All together, the visit and prescriptions cost less than $60 and thankfully, with our school insurance, I will likely get reimbursed. It was so easy peasy! And my skin is so much happier now! 😎

My Spanish is getting better and I’ve come to really appreciate the ease of busing around the city. I now know where to buy everything I need, including hair spray (which was surprisingly difficult to find). So compared to how I was feeling in the early stages of studying abroad, things have gotten much easier on that front! Yay! I also found a tasty restaurant that served American style pancakes (not super common here), and they were delicious! Here are a few more pics from walks around the city. I hope everyone is doing well and thanks for stopping by the blog! 😃