minutes of us standing at the right stop. Like with Buenos Aires and Brasil you just pay a flat fare so you don’t tell anyone where you’re getting off - which makes life a little tricky when you haven’t the first idea where your going! We sat on the bus for a while and although we had rough directions from the hostel nothing seemed like the instructions we’d been given. We both decided that we had been on the bus long enough and were going to get off when a kind man asked us if we needed any help. Once again, thank you to all of those kind South American people who are always more than willing to help out a foreign tourist who can’t speak the lingo or haven’t a clue where they are going. He pointed us in the right direction and even went down and told the bus driver where we were going and asked him to stop and tell us where to get off as the kind mans stop was the next one. We waved and grinned frantically through the window at him when we realised he’d got off and was walking up the

street, hopefully he saw us. We were on the bus for a further 5 or 10 minutes before we pulled up outside the mall.

The mall was very Trafford Centre looking. It again had the same usual signs we’ve seen all over the world: Adidas, Nike, Christian Dior, Luis Vuitton etc etc. There was a huge Christmas nativity scene set up in the middle of the mall and it was hard to imagine that you were in Uruguay. If you ignored the signs in Spanish you could have sworn you were in any modern shopping centre, literally anywhere in the world - they are all the same and basically sell the same old stuff wherever you are. Global brands it seems are here to stay and it kind of makes shopping a very boring experience - but it does help when you need to purchase something electrical!

Due to my Ipod’s