Around the World in 180 Days: Buenos Aires for the Third Time

I haven't been posting regularly for a while and won't be posting on a (hopefully) daily basis for a while, so here's what the next two weeks or so look like: We'll be in Buenos Aires until the night of Tuesday 5 when we fly to San Francisco (yes, it's random, but that's how the airfares worked out). We arrive in SF on the morning of the 6 and have until the 8 before we fly to Hong Kong for one night and then to Hanoi. Once we leave Buenos Aires I doubt that I'll be able to post until a day or two into our stay in Hanoi because San Francisco will be a flurry of running around, we don't arrive until late in Hong Kong, and we'll be in Hanoi in the middle of the New Year's festivities and will be busy seeing those and recovering from our numerous red-eyes for a little while.
The highlight of our stay in Montevideo was going to be Carnival but the parade was cancelled because of 'bad weather'. The next day we found out that there actually had been bad weather at three in the morning but that wasn't any consollation when we looking at the clear, starry (even in the middle of the city!) sky at midnight. Instead we went to a preformance at the carnival museum. We had expected it to be mostly singing, and we surprised when most of it was actually skits that we couldn't understand for the most part. One of them was a shortened version of the German movie 'The Wave' but the others we couldn't figure out. This is a perfect time to lead into griping about the accent, something I have delayed doing.
Bolivians and Peruvians we could, while not perfectly, understand and be understood. They pride themselves on the perfect Castillian accents and don't speak too quickly. Not so in Argentina and Uruguay. Here, while they don't 'Che this, che that' like we were told the do in Bolivia, drop some s's and 'sh' the others and pronounce 'll' and 'y' like 'sh'. Small changes, but when they speak a hundred words a minute and you just want to get to your hotel after being on the bus for 20-some hours isn't a lot of fun.
Anyways, after the carnival performance we walked home, swung by a store, made dinner, and when, by the time we turned it at almost 1 the sky was still clear, bemoaned all weather forecasts.
The next morning we schlepp back to the bus station. It's a two-hour ride to Colonia and when we get there we're glad we aren't spending the night. The attraction of Colonia is the well-preserved Portuguese architecture in one part of the city and we expect to be able to meander along the streets for a while. Drawing out the meandering we've still walked all over the old city at least once in less than an hour so we sit at a cafe until it's time to head back and catch a ferry.
Customs is painless and we board a ferry many times the size of the one that took us from Concordia to Salto. It's different from the Anacortes ferries, just having rows and rows of seats facing one way instead of booths. There's also no place to go outside.
There was some misdirection when disembarking, but by following the crowd we make it off the boat an hour later and go collect luggage from the fastest-moving conveyor belt in the history of conveyor belts.
In the evening we go to a secret restaurant by the name of ILATINA, so capitalized because that was how it was on the wall of the restaurant and I can't figure out a better way. Secret restaurants are often in the house of the chef where you sit at communal tables and aren't told the location until you make a reservation, but this one didn't have communal tables. Dinner was amazing. I was so glad that the veggie options weren't just the meat options minus the meat, and that they didn't rely heavily on cheese or salads. The courses were tiny but there were 5 of them and we didn't get home until after 12.