One of our family travel sayings (in addition to our one about the Dutch: “everywhere you go, there they are” – seriously, those dutch get EVERYWHERE) is that there are ‘living’ cities and ‘visiting’ cities. It’s not completely binary, but more of a fluid spectrum and based entirely on our opinion, so you can disagree all you want.
At one end of the spectrum, you have the poor cities that are completely overrun by tourists (usually ones that are popular cruise destinations…we’ve come to loathe cruises despite having never actually been on one) such that locals are outnumbered and forgotten. They might be fun or interesting places to visit, but we couldn’t even imagine trying to live there (we are looking at you Rome, Dubrovnik and Venice).
For us, Montevideo is all the way on the other end of our spectrum – tourists are forgotten! Maybe it was because we were coming to the end of our travels, maybe it was because we were there in the off season, or maybe it was because we just didn’t go to the right places. For whatever reason, however, we weren’t terribly impressed by Montevideo as visitors, but we did thoroughly enjoy ‘living’ there – for a short while anyway.
We visited one of the top attractions of the city – the football-themed Stadium Museum. Uruguay was home to the first ever World Cup and there is a museum at the stadium that hosted the final. We’re huge World Cup fans so you can imagine our excitement to see the stadium for the 1930 final. Our expectations were lowered after reading the online reviews, but after visiting the place we came to realize that our expectations had not been lowered enough.
It was a bizarre collection of artifacts seemingly randomly placed around a large room. There was absolutely no flow or story being told and really nothing interesting or impressive about it at all. A framed picture of the Japanese squad from the 2002 World Cup (nothing to do with Uruguay) was next to a shirt Pele allegedly wore in some youth tournament (nothing to do with Uruguay or the World Cup) and a caricature drawing of Rod Stewart (nothing to do with anything!? We think it was there because he once performed in the stadium). There was not even a presentation showing the story of the World Cup, or even anything much about the 1930 World Cup really.
We also played the tourist when we went to Pocitos beach. It was a very nice beach with calm water and a huge tide. We had a lot of fun playing there for a few hours. There were no vendors walking up and down selling hats, sunglasses, drinks or whatever. There were no tourist trap restaurants charging double the prices for being on the beach and the beach itself was surrounded by apartment complexes and office buildings (definitely a ‘living’ city!).
We strolled along the Rambla, which was again a pleasant experience without offering anything to really see or do for the tourist.
We also visited the old town, and strolled around for a few hours.
There was a cluster of touristy shops by the port where we were able to buy a Uruguay football top, but the highlight for us was a meal at the ‘Sin Pretensiones’ restaurant, which was fantastic (one of, if not THE best meal we had in South America) and the perfect place for a birthday lunch!
Mostly, however, we ‘lived’ Montevideo. Our Airbnb was excellent (no internet issues – hallelujah!) and right next to a nice supermarket. We worked and home schooled and ate at home for almost every meal. We walked around town and stopped for drinks at a local cafe.
The highlight, however, was a play area for people living in our apartment complex. The place was completely enclosed by the complex such that only residents could get into it making it very safe. The boys loved playing there and made fast friends with the Uruguayan kids who were all very nice and keen to practice some English or (kindly) make fun of the boys’ Spain-accented Spanish.
Not only were the children in Montevideo very friendly and welcoming, always allowing our boys to join in their games, we also found the local adults were the same. They were always interested in where we were from and very polite. When we stopped to run around in the old town, the locals even loaned us a ball to play with.
We did have one issue with Montevideo and that was a brand new law stating that children must be in some sort of car seat. Quite a few Uber drivers apologetically refused to take us before we realized this was definitely a real thing (of course, if we really were living in Montevideo we would have wholeheartedly agreed with this law!) A law about passenger safety AND people actually pay attention to it!? Are we still in South America!? Fortunately for us, taxis seemed to be immune to this law, so we (again like locals) would WhatsApp for a taxi to come pick us up when we needed to go somewhere.
So thumbs up to Montevideo as a ‘living’ city. Not sure we could recommend it as a vacation destination, but it certainly had its charm. One Uber driver (that agreed to take us) even told us to go somewhere else in Uruguay ‘for more fun’. However, the biggest tip-off that we were off the beaten tourist path? Not a dutch person in sight…
