Mendoza Madness

Ok so I´m slolwly starting to catch up to my present day adventures, but there´s still a lot more to go. Rather than back tracking some more, I´m going to skip ahead to the amazing time I just had in Mendoza, Argentina!

For Easter my university gave us 2 days off from school so my friends Rachael, Meredith, and I planned a trip to Mendoza, which is like 7 hours by bus [depending on traffic at the border] and is on the other side of the Andes. We only booked our hostel and buses in advance and left everything else open to whatever we wanted to do. We had NO idea that we were about to have the most awesome, crazy time together.

Waiting in the cold 

Sporting the trendy
"socks with sandals" look
at the border

Somehow, like all my other adventures, Mendoza began somewhat chaotically because we almost missed our bus. Luckily we made it just in time and the ride was all right--we had these chairs called "semi cama" [semi bed] and got to watch the movie The Dark Knight and eat these ham and cheese sandwiches we got for free. Poor Mer couldn´t fall asleep, but Rae and I passed out thanks to the sleeping pills I brought. We awoke around 4am to go through immigration and "customs" at the border between Chile and Argentina, which was pretty awful. It was freezing outside and we were exhausted and let me just say that efficiency didn´t exist there. After getting our passports stamped we just stood around for a while waiting for customs for about half an hour and then nothing even happened and all the passengers just got back onto the bus. They didn´t check our bags or anything. It was a pretty comical situation; except that we were also just pissed off because it was so early in the morning.

Lots o' meat--clearly I'm not vegetarian anymore

We got to Mendoza around 7:30am [two hours behind schedule. typical South America] and took a cab to our hostel. Our friend Brian met up with us there and we all ate breakfast and snoozed for a little. Then we got lunch at this market that was packed with people buying seafood, meat, cheese, olives, spices, and tons of other food and did our own little taste test of the best alfajores, these cookie type desserts with different fillings and covered in chocolate, at Havanna cafe.

Alfajor

Yeah, we bought one of each flavor

So many kinds of olives!

After refueling our bodies, we headed out for our first excursion: the famous biking wine tour! We had all heard great things about it and were really looking forward to biking to a bunch of different vineyards and even to a couple chocolatiers. Yet, everyone failed to mention to us that the wineries are all VERY far apart and difficult to find. At the bike rental, the owner told us to turn the wrong way so we wound up lost for a while and these police drove up and asked me where we were going. I said that we were trying to find the vineyards and they basically told us not to go to that way because it was sketchy and not for tourists. Grreeeattt. Then we turned around and lo and behold we hit a construction zone blocking the road and had to do a HUGE detour. When we finally found our first vineyard the security guard told us it was closed! You can only imagine our devastation. He gave us directions to some more wineries and hope was still in our eyes when we hopped back on our bikes and rode away. Too bad the directions he gave were also wrong and we wound up lost again and in the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere wound up being very beautiful, but we turned around and after a while FINALLY discovered a winery!! We decided to stay there for the rest of the time and gave up trying to go to 

anywhere else. I tried three of their wines [Rose, Malbec, and CabSauv] and then we all shared a couple bottles and had a grand time sharing stories and laughing. We weren´t classy enough to be able to order food though--we tried to and the waitress said that the kitchen was closed even though a little while later we saw another table getting dessert. Ugh. After some time we rode back to the bike rental [which by the way, we had one tandem bike and two singles. The tandem was awful for riding on those roads, but thanks to my lack of bike skills and almost making Mer and I fall over 3 times, I didn´t have to ride it] and enjoyed some of the free wine there before getting on a bus back to our hostel. Brian left to go to Cordoba that night and Mer, Rae, and I scarffed on some free choripan [chorizo sausages in buns] at our hostel before passing out for the night.

concentration

I LOVE this photo of Rae, Mer, and I

This is the winery that wound up being closed so we didn't get to go inside :(

We had no idea what we were going to do the next day, but while eating breakfast we decided to go paragliding [in Spanish it's parapente]. None of us had ever gone sky diving or anything so it was all of our first times doing something extreme in the air. We had a little time to kill before our guide was
going to come pick us up from the hostel and we went to get some food at this restaurant called El Rey de la Milanesa and had well, the specialty of course, Milanesa. It was actually really similar to Lomo a

With my milanesa--nom nom

lo pobre, which is a typical Chilean dish that I'm obsessed with, and it made me a very happy camper. After returning to the hostel our guide came to get us in this superrr janky truck that almost broke down while we were driving to the paragliding place. We were going maybe 10 mph and the driver joked that we might have to get out and push the truck the rest of the way [not funny]. Thankfully we made it without having to resort to any drastic measures and joined up with the rest of the group going paragliding. A different truck took us to the top of the mountain [ours would NOT have made the journey] and we waited up there for a while before the guides started showing up with the paragliding gear. That's when I started to get a lil nervous. We thought that there was going to be some kind of group huddle or info sesh before we started, but nope, instead they just strapped you in and off you went! We watched the first few people go and then one of the guides pointed at me. I put on some knee pads, a helmet, and some kind of chair thing and then once we were strapped together he told me to start running when he said to go. Rae took off right before I did and she and her guide failed at going the first time cause the wind shifted so they fell back onto the ground. I was afraid that would happen to me, but luckily it didn't and before I knew it, we were soaring in the air!! We were up there for about half an hour and the guide and I talked about our lives and such and enjoyed the incredibly breathtaking view. I told him that that I love roller coasters so he did a bunch of tricks while we were in the air. We glided across the mountains and swirled around and at some points I couldn't stop laughing because it was just so awesome. I´m not gonna lie, I was a little nauseous at the end from the spinning tricks, but it was seriously amazing. 

Mer was one of the last people to go so she got to go all the way to the ground, but Rae and I landed back on the mountain. While Mer was gone a couple Argentinean guys [one worked for the paragliding company and the other was his friend] started talking to us and asked if we wanted to go out with them that night. We swapped contact info and then left them to go unite back with Mer back at the paragliding place. Rae and I rode down this steep, 4 wheel drive, dirt road in the back of a pick up truck and it was so fun! She had to put up with me singing Bohemian Rhapsody, Born This Way,

Awkward face...?

Don´t Stop Believin´, and some other songs as we bumped our way down the mountain. There was another woman and her dog in the back with us too and that poor pup was not having fun like we were. It was snuggling with Rae for a while, which was pretty cute though. 

Back in Mendoza we got dinner and then got ready to go out. Our Chilean phones weren´t working so we used facebook to communicate with the Argentineans and met up with them and their friends [more Argentineans and a group of French people] at a bar. We got these tall pitcher type things filled with drinks called Fernet, Caipa [or something like that], and beer and then all went to a huge club named Voodoo. It was a lot of fun and I danced with one of the guys we had met earlier. Mer, Rae, and I left early though [2am is early here] because we had to get up a few hours later to go on another adventure!

To be continued...