Big Ships: Meat

We slept in past breakfast again.  This was in the plan, since we needed to leave around nominal bedtime for the airport.  But that story comes later.

When traveling with kids we try not to place too many demands on what we "have" to see or do and try and go with the flow.  However, as I mentioned, we really wanted to try some Uruguayan beef, and T had heard about the Mercado del Puerto, where there was a large collection of parillas - open grills.  So that was our objective for Monday.

We walked down through the old town to the port.  I will say that we had beautiful views of the port from our hotel room.  After seeing the container ships at the Panama Canal, D was really interested in watching the cranes unload containers onto trucks and the tugboats pushing the ships around in the harbor.  Montevideo is not that big of a port, so it's easy to watch all the goings on.  But it's big enough that you get some container ships in there and there's some action to watch.  It was a really nice dovetail with our trip to the canal.  Almost like we planned it that way...

We found Mercado del Puerto easily, and indeed, it is a large collection of parilla restaurants housed in a classic market building.  I had thought it might have charcuteries or butchers interspersed with the restaurants, but no, it was only restaurants.  I assume that in historical times the Mercado housed mainly the former.

We browsed the selection of cafes and chose one.  We ordered the mixed grill for "2-3 people."  I honestly didn't know if that would be enough.  Ha - the pile of steak and short ribs we got fed us for two meals!  It came hot off the parilla grill, on our own individual table-size grill, and was served with french fries and green salad.  I liked the rib cuts the best, and the flavor was amazing. 

We walked back to the hotel the long way around, walking right next to the port yards where we could see stacks of shipping containers and various lifts and cranes scurrying around to move them.  After we passed the port, we got onto La Rambla, which was a wide sidewalk overlooking the ocean.

We got back to the hotel hot and tired, and the kids took naps - again a brilliant part of our plan to prepare for a late bedtime and redeye flight.  We packed up, ate all of our remaining leftovers for supper, and then headed off to the airport around 11pm for our redeye back up to Panama city.