LAST DAY IN MONTEVIDEO
My last day in Montevideo was one of the fullest days in the last month. In addition to having to somewhat clean my apartment and pack up, I invited myself to lunch with Cecilia Regules, the travel agent who organized my tour of Montevideo and my trip to Puntes del Estes. I went to her office to pick up and pay for my bus ticket to Colonia and ferry ticket to Buenas Aires on Saturday. She wasn’t there. She had told me where she always ate lunch, food as good as her grandmother cooked she said, and I hoped to join her while eating and hear more of her stories. She was there with a table full of family: her sister with her retired banker husband and a friend. So I joined them for a fish lunch. And the story I heard was marvelous.
The women talked and Brian Deane, the banker, told me his life story. His mother was Uruguayan and his father British. They lived in a beautiful house in rural England and then his father returned to Uruguay. (I may have jumbled this story a little.)
Brian was especially proud of his great grandfather, Sir Thomas Deane, architect of The Museum Building at Trinity College in Dublin. (Video at https://makingvictoriandublin.com/)
But his father sent him to a high class public (really quite private and expensive) boarding school in England along with his twin brother. Brian was a great student, his brother, who was a great sportsman, wasn’t. So the father determined that Brian would study business and become a banker, which he did, a successful banker in Buenos Aires, where he married Cecelia’s sister as his second wife. The twin brother became a farmer and ended up farming grain in Bolivia. At some point the parents family became aquainted with a guy whose last name was also Deane, Disque Deane (his story is on Wikipedia). He asked each of the family members what they did for a living, none of which impressed him, until he found out that the twin brother was making good money grain farming in Bolivia. It turns out that this guy had been in real estate deals with Donald Trump and was fabulously wealthy and looking for places to invest further. So he invested $50 million in Bolfarms S.R.I., a farming venture in Bolivia which also made the twin brother, who died in February, so wealthy that he had two private planes, one of which he would fly to Uruguay each year to celebrate their joint birthdays with Brian.
This klconnnection to Donald Trump at a meal I had invited myself to in Montevideo seemed surprising to me. Another friend of Cecilia stopped by the table. It turns out that she was the mother of the wife of the President of Uruguay. I was a little blown away.
In the evening Rafael and Chrystel from down the hall in apartment 501 took me to their favorite steakhouse, Garcia, where we had a wonderful meal as a thank you for them bringing me food when I was locked in when I had Covid my first week here. They met here at Montevideo University, he had come from Brazil and she from Venezuela. They have a small micro brewery and he works in making international connections for a multinational country. (Again I can’t remember the details properly.) But they are so warm and friendly with no reason to treat an old man with this consideration except out of the goodness of their hearts. You can see their brewery at @Terocerveza on Instagram.
My last day in Montevideo was the best day in Montevideo.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 