Thursday - A pretty intensive day

Thursday I was teaching in the morning and afterwards heading directly back to the hotel. I rested a bit and worked then the whole afternoon in the hotel to avoid the greatest heat. Later on I did a walk on the beach, which I'm always enjoying a lot and then went to my favorite café just next to the hotel, which is called La Dulceria. As it turned out later I just had the perfect timing, because they were celebrating the Swedish Santa Lucía (i.e., the longest night of the year) that evening in the café with Saffranbröd and Glögg (the Swedish name for Glühwein) and the owner of La Dulceria invited me to join. It was extremely cool because there was an antropologist there (Ana Luisa Valdés) explaining everything about the origin of this celebration. She is originally from Uruguay, but lived most of her live in Sweden in exile. Among the many things she does, she travels around the whole world to find out about the origins of our food and was explaining lots of very interesting things to us that day. Even though some of the people there were very fluent in english it was a big advantage that my spanish is sufficiently good to understand most of the things. 

After the Santa Lucía celebration I went for a run along Las Ramblas. When I was running the first time more than a week ago, I was telling myself that I want to run all the way from the hotel until kilometer 0 in the Old City of Montevideo. This day was not as hot as the day before and I decided that I want to give it a try. From the hotel to the kilometer 0 its 8,5 kilometers (17 in both direction). Even though I was never running such a distance before (never run more than 1:15 before) I have to say that it was not very difficult or exhausting. I enjoyed the nice temperatures and watched while I was running all the people walking or running along Las Ramblas, sitting there drinking mate or fishing. The closer I came to the Old City the less people where there, but still I felt save running there alone at night. On the way back I felt that my muscles are not really used to run on hard underground and to run such distances, but since I was running at a pulse rate of just a bit above 150 I never got really tired and could even speed up on the last kilometers. After 17 kilometers and 1:45 I reached the starting point and was pretty happy with myself. Before going back to the hotel I did a short walk at the beach and streched my muscles a bit to avoid that I'm completely dead the next day. 
After that experience I really want to run a marathon at some point, but for this I need to train a bit more, because I want to be able to enjoy the run just like I enjoyed this almost half marathon ;-).