Life at the Hostel Punta Ballena Bar is pretty easy at the moment. I have finally started doing some work and I’m not feeling like a complete freeloader anymore.

Violet (other WorkAwayer) and Martin (the boss) get at each other a bit, Violet’s Spanish is way better than mine but I am catching up quickly. I think this enterprise, learning Spanish, might be just what I needed to slow the inexorable advancement of rust in my brain.

The hostel is located some five hundred metres from the beach and yesterday I went for a walk along it and explored the rather underwhelming selection of stuff in the local supermarket.

Will not surprise to know that the meat section was spectacular, the vegetable part not so much, and the wine and spirits section just surprising with wine as cheap as 70p per carton and Wiskey at seven pounds a bottle.

The place is very social and we hardly have had a night where we did not have company. It seems to me that people just turn up with or without drinks, with or without instruments and the party begins.

Below Jose y Gonzalo with their inimitable latin sound. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody that consumes so vast quantities of whiskey, and I live in Glasgow.

So it was pork roast on Friday night and not to upset the cows too much, beef roast on Saturday night.

Santiago, Martin’s cousin joined us and we had a couple of bottles of red, a couple of large bottles of beer and half a bottle of whiskey to wash down 2 kg of beef between the 5 of us, and Violetta is vegetarian.

Quite remarkably the delicious cut of meat below was just 220 U$ per Kg (less than £10 in total).

All slept well, one assumes, and everybody woke up ready to do it all again, outside this time and with a fuller complement of people.

There is something I have not seen in a while here, something I have not seen infact from when I was four or five. I grew up with my grandparents and we occasionally used to go over to other farmer’s houses and, while I do not remember singing there was the same kind of convivial atmosphere that appears to be the norm here.

I think even trying it would be difficult to get stressed in Uruguay.