El Ateneo inside and out.

We stopped for a day in several coastal towns along the way. In downtown Montevideo, Uruguay, we got off the autobus touristica and walked across the street to a rather gloomy series of shops under a covered walkway on the front of one of the oldest historic buildings in the city. The young man at the counter of the very small book and magazine store, Libraria Giornali, spoke NO English so I asked him a bit about the store in my sloppy Spanish and with a lot of hand-waving and I gleaned that he mostly had Spanish and German language books, no English, the store has been there for some time, and he lives on the third floor. One of the things I liked about the store was that each riser on the stairs to the second floor advertised a book. The only ones that I could translate were 1984, Men Are From Mars & Women Are From Venus, Eva Luna, and Harry Potter. I have stairs up to the second floor in our store and I think I’ll do this as well.

At the end of the day we sailed off for the two day trip to the Falklands. What a cool place, both literally and figuratively. They have beautiful sheep, lots of penguins, and one little tiny book store (the only one in the town of Stanley). It was called the “Pink House Books and Gifts” and they had limited books, mostly Uruguayan and Chilean authors, but fabulous sweaters of alpaca and island-grown wool as well as a ton of Penguin stuff.