Uruguay is beautiful

We have arrived in Piriapolis. Piriapolis is the most eastern part that is not the Atlantic ocean yet. But it looks like the ocean and it is amazing. Now we have more beaches and ocean. We are staying on a ranch that was built in the early 1800's as a stage coach stop for the spaniards. It was a place to leave your horses and rest. It is absolutely incredible. I feel like we are living on a movie set. In fact there have been some commercials made here. We have our room and then we come to the main building for breakfast, class, lunch and dinner. We watched a movie last night in this room. They have cable! The Internet does not work though, so we will have to ride a bus into town to send these blogs. Because we are in the countryside we are a bit isolated, but there is a city bus that goes by the driveway every hour. We are going to ride it into town this afternoon.
What amazes me is 10 minutes away by bus we have left a rolling green hill ranch to arrive at a seaside beach area.
Uruguay is small in size overall, but the architecture is so different and the influences from other countries are so strong in different areas. I guess the United States is like that, but Uruguay is so small...maybe the size of Montana.
Back to the estancia. We are the only guests and for me it is hard to be waited on. Charro is the cook and maid and I really like her. It just feels wrong not to help clear our dishes or to have her and her husband sit in the kitchen while we eat. She did all our laundry yesterday. We were just expecting the use of the washing machine. I am having a hard time making it clear that she is not going to iron our clothes. I might learn most of my Spanish from her. She is going to make empanadas tomorrow and Allen is going to help her.
Yesterday we hired a man (Diego) to take us on a two hour tour of the town and surrounding beaches. It is definitely a more expensive area but very nice. We are here at the perfect time. We have been told that the day after Christmas the beach towns explode with people from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and of course Uruguayans. We visited a hotel that has 400 rooms, two hot pools and one outdoor pool and a casino. It is called hotel Argentino. It was built in the early 1920's when there was nothing here except a train station and some houses that were built by the man who founded the city. The hotel is still open and touring it was way cool. There were some exhibits of the older items like glass stemware, wine bottles and other dishes. Some of the swimsuits of the day and the like. I felt a bit like we were on the Titanic. It was impressive now, but in its day it would have been absolutely unimaginable.
The classes might be going a bit better, but still I would have to say "No hablo Espaniol."
We are in good hands and look forward to being here until next Monday.