And so then what the heck

Having made that unanswerable case against going ashore, I decided to go ashore. Even bought a necklace of brightly dyed wooden beads from a vendor in a city park. But I can tell you almost nothing about Uruguay or Montevideo. City streets, narrower than some; relatively clean sidewalks paved a long time ago for pedestrians more sure-footed than the ones where I come from; people going about their business, the young ones often smiling, the older ones less so. There are at least three cruise ships in port, so it may be that most of the people I saw were, like me, wandering in hopes of finding a bargain or a souvenir or something deeply representative of the innermost soul of Uruguay.

The downtown area closest to the piers is the oldest part of town and has some beautiful buildings, many of them in apparent disrepair. It may be that the life of Montevideo happens somewhere else, and the old town is left to banks (of which I saw many), shipping companies (of which I saw a few), cafés serving bankers and shippers, and purveyors of brightly dyed wooden bead necklaces and other tourist tchotshkes (and I apologize to any Jewish readers, that's as close as I can come to spelling that invaluable Yiddish word).

So now we have a conundrum. When visiting a new country for a day or two, should one (a) take a packaged tour, which will acquaint one with the tourist version of the country , (b) wander on one's own, possibly encountering a unique insight into the country and more likely just getting a bit of exercise and/or a close encounter with the new country's criminal elements, or (c) nap on deck and watch the container manipulation machines lift and shuffle identical containers around and wait for the other people at one's table at dinner to provide one with the Readers Digest version of the country?

At the moment, I'm going with (b), since it's the only option that ends up with a nice necklace of brightly dyed wooden beads around my neck.