Setting Sail

The transition onto the Silversea ship (Silver Whisper) could not have gone better. The cruise line has this down to a well-oiled machine – from transferring bags directly to your onboard suite, to registering you via passport, to distributing your ship access card. We’d booked a deluxe veranda (that was the only option left) and we had no complaints. This is a much smaller ship that we were on when we went to Alaska on the same cruise line. There are only about 300 passengers and nearly an equal number of crew – and it definitely feels less full. There are fewer food venues, but they are plenty for us. Navigating around the ship after a few rounds of exploration was easy.

Our first evening we had dinner outdoors on the pool deck at a place called The Grill. As usual when we travel, the world proves to be very small…. Our waiter was from Vijayawada in India where we were guests at dear friend’s wedding a number of years ago. He was amazed that of all the places in India we could’ve visit, we ended up in a relatively small and unknown city.

The cruise talent in the show that night was very good with a number of extremely talented singers and dancers. There are also a number of guest lectures on topics that should be really interesting to listen to on sea days, especially.

Montevideo

Our first stop was in Montevideo as we crossed into Uruguay. The geography of borders between Argentina, Uruguay and Chile is very complicated in this area – have a look at a map and you’ll see that it’s possible to cris-cross countries in relatively short distances.

Instead of taking a guided tour, we decided to walk from the cruise ship into Montevideo through the old city. The old part of this growing city houses lots of crafts vendors as you would normally see in any touristic area, and some of the historic buildings that are a few centuries old.

We decided to take a tour of the main theater called Solís Theatre (Spanish: Teatro Solís) that is Uruguay’s most important and renowned theater. It opened in 1856. The building was designed by the Italian architect and was named after the explorer Juan Díaz de Solís who was the first European explorer to land in modern day Uruguay.

In 1998, the government of Montevideo started a major reconstruction of the theatre that was completed in 2004.  The theatre has two different stages – one for large scale productions and one that is a “black box” that can be configured for a very intimate audience or expanded to about 300 patrons in a horseshoe fashion. It is a public institution despite originally being built by private investors. Ticket prices are a full range to accommodate all economic strata.

 Also, lovely we found a nice café to have lunch recommended by our tour guide in the theater and then walked into the central part of the city while we were walking along their version of a Rambla on the waterside promenade we spotted basically a Jewish community center where they have sports activities for children.

We got in a conversation with a Catholic woman who brings her daughter to the club because she has disabilities and they have a group at the club for her to do sports. She really gave us an earful about the lack of good government in Montevideo – that the crime rate is high, we should watch our belongings, and that some of the districts are really impoverished and the public services are inadequate. The rich are upset because they are taxed very heavily and the poor keep suffering; she called the government “communists”. We concluded that as a tourist we don’t always get the whole picture…

After walking more than 14,000 steps, we decided that the hot tub on the boat would feel good and it certainly did. There’s a large contingent of passengers from the UK on board and we had a lovely conversation with a gentleman from England who used to work in telecom and now is traveling with his wife regularly. The majority of people on board are retired and are avid travelers at different levels of physical ability – we fit right in.

We’d been asked if we were Jewish by a couple of people who spotted our Stars of David necklaces, and for Shabbat the crew indeed set up a table with automatic candles, some prayer books, kippot, a tallit, a lovely challah, along with two bottles of red wine for us to use ceremonially. It was a very quickie service, but it was nice to gather that way. The small group includes a couple and a woman from Calabasas, California, some folks from Philadelphia. One of the women took charge of finding a table at La Terrazza for us all to have dinner together, which ended up being quite lively.

Next stop…Sea Days!