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Published: April 8th 2010
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My apologies for both the lack of pictures from the past few weeks and the general lack of entries…my excuse is that I went to Buenos Aires, came back for three days, left again for Mendoza, came back and two days later my mom came to visit and left two days ago, so the point is that these past three weekends have been spent away from my apartment and my other free time has been fairly nonexistent. Although I also realize yall don’t exactly hang on my every update, so I’ll stop with the explanations and give a recount of how Mendoza and showing my mom around went.
So, Mendoza. It’s about 100 km (60 miles…as a side note, my mental math skills have vastly improved from these past three months of converting everything to the metric system and haggling out how much I have to pay when we split the bill) west of Santiago, but the bus ride we took was about seven hours, one way (not counting the stop at the border) because the route is mostly through the Andes, and navigating the highway on a double-decker bus along winding dirt roads through the mountains takes longer than
one would think…anyway, Anna and I and two of our friends took an overnight bus on Thursday because we don’t have class on Friday and so we could have more time there. We all managed to sleep at least for awhile on the bus, although we ended up getting to the border at like 3 in the morning and had to wake up to go through a moderately torturous customs process and get our baggage checked. But some of our other friends went a different weekend earlier in the semester and had to wait three hours for their turn at the customs place, so all in all it was fine. We ended up arriving in the bus terminal at about 5:30 in the morning and had to wait for about an hour for, you know, the sun to rise and for things to start opening up so we could kill a few more hours before we could check into the hostel. We finally got there and dropped our stuff off and explored the town in the morning, took a little siesta, and then went back out and continued the exploration.
A little background information about Mendoza: the reason people
go there in the first place is because it’s apparently some of the best wine country in South America and there are countless different kinds of wineries to visit—big industrial ones with hundreds of workers to smaller family-owned ones with less than twenty, and we also visited a chocolateria which I will include in my story—so on Saturday we took a taxi about twenty minutes out of the city to go to this place where you can rent bikes and take a biking tour along a winery route. It. Was. Awesome. We got there around 10 in the morning to make sure we were able to rent the bikes, received a map with all the options for wineries we could visit, and set off. It was a beautiful day and the little side roads where the wineries were located were so picturesque and peaceful and I hadn’t ridden a bike in about four months...we were all really content (even before we started drinking the wine…just kidding) and it was a great experience. We toured a bigger winery (for free! Including the wine tasting at the end! Score) and then went to a chocolateria that was next to it, where they
made specialty liquors, chocolate, and grew olives to make olive oil and other kinds of spreads. Obviously the chocolate made me very happy and the liquors were delicious (they had absinthe and Anna and one of the other girls tried it and I tried some of theirs and oh boy, it’s strong. Like straight rubbing alcohol. But sadly not hallucinogenic…) and by then it was the afternoon, so we decided to bike to the end of the route, which was 6 miles away, to eat lunch at one of the suggested places. To be honest, that bike ride was a bit less pleasant because by that time it was rather humid and sunny and we were all dehydrated…I think I can speak for the others when I say lunch was very welcome. After that we biked back and went back to our hostel and took another siesta and finished the walking around, then left Sunday morning and got back to Santiago in the afternoon. The bus ride back was quite awe-inspiring although simultaneously vaguely terrifying…I think the pictures I took will demonstrate better than I can explain, but the highway through the Andes is really narrow and there around 180
degree turns every few meters in some of the parts, and the bus was swaying every time we took a turn and it was a long way down to the bottom…suffice to say we were a little startled at first. Anyway, driving through the Andes was amazing enough to distract us, for the most part.
And then my mom came to visit on Wednesday! She had an overnight flight on Tuesday night and I booked her a room in the same apartment building I’m living in because rooms are also available for weekly rent, and after I went to class Wednesday morning I came back to make sure she was still alive and everything, and there she was! It was all very surreal. But anyway for the next few days I showed her around Santiago and we went to Vina del Mar and Valparaiso one day and went to Easter Mass in the oldest cathedral in Santiago (and were possibly on TV, as there were cameras everywhere and people taking pictures that always somehow seemed to be of us…) and then she left on Monday 😞 so I’m really glad she came to visit and I’m sorry it
wasn’t for very long, but she said she had a good vacation here and I’m glad.
Hmm this entry is bordering on the too-long variety, so I’m going to end it abruptly. Until next time!
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