Walking through the old city or Ciudad Viejo in Montevideo on a Saturday had to be quite possibly the creepiest place I've ever been. Most cities I have been to are usually somewhat open on a Saturday and we thought that the city's main attraction would be at least somewhat open on a Saturday. Nope. Nothing. Closed up tight. We traversed the streets, zig zagging across the area until we came to the Mercado del Puerto. The Mercado is an old railroad station that was built and never used for its intended purpose. It is now filled with restaurants and bars and huge grills cooking every kind of meat you can imagine. What amazed us was the building looked like it would collapse at any moment and what had they put inside it? Huge wood-burning fires! Talk about tempting fate.

Martin & I both finally figured out how to sit down and get service (instead of waiting for someone to seat us). We ordered huge steaks that were both about the size of my forearm. hey were like butter! Service was slow, but with that much meat to digest it wasn't a bad thing at all. We ordered dessert. I had a yummy, flan with dulce de leche and Martin had tiramisu. We had seen one go by earlier that looked lovely. Martin's was kind of lop-sided.the meal was probably on par with Ruth's Chris Steakhouse or something similiar here in the U.S. The meal only cost us about $25. For everything.

The creepiest thing about the Old City was that no one was around anywhere except for the occasional stragler or begger. Everyone was eating at the Mercado but every store was closed and the streets had no cars anywhere. We were beginning to think this was the wrong place to be in the South American autumn. We took a look at our map once we got back to our hotel and saw that there were several shopping centers in Montevideo. We then found out that all shopping centers are opened until 10PM. We took a cheap taxi to the Punta Carretas Shooping Center that is housed in an elegant old prison. I found this great shot of the interior of the mall on this guy's website:

It looks like a normal mall until you read the name of the Store on the left.