Photos from Uruguay (I)

I owe the wireless access that I have today to a visit I've made to a private IB high school. The person whose room I've rented is a teacher here and a lecturer at the University of Chile, and today I gave a talk about the US and Latin America in the Cold War here at the high school. The students were in their third and fourth years, practically college students, and the questions were excellent, and it was nice to be back in front of a classroom.

In any case, I have another hour here so I'm going to try and catch up with all of the photos. When Nicole was here, we spent a few days in Uruguay. I went to the library there too, which is a marvellous old building that still operates by card catalog. Indeed, in Montevideo one notices much more the older architecture, from the nineteenth century especially. At first we thought that there was simply fewer old buildings in Buenos Aires, but when we returned, we noticed that they were there but overwhelmed by the neon and steel of new development. Montevideo, by contrast, has, perhaps as the result of less economic success in the last 60 years, a better preserved historical environment. Indeed, some people still use horses in the streets of Montevideo (and not for tourism). Here is the canonical building of Montevideo, built in the more prosperous era at the beginning of the twentieth century. At 26 stories, at the time it was constructed it was the tallest in South America, and remains the tallest in Montevideo.