Mendoza

16/04/13 to 22/04/13 – We had heard that Argentina was in a bit of a mess economically, and that we would get many more pesos for our money if we exchanged US dollars on the ‘blue’ market, rather than withdrawing from ATMs or changing money at official ‘cambios’. As we’d just returned from the wilderness and only had one night in Santiago before our bus across the border, we spent the evening frantically withdrawing Chilean Pesos, maxing out the withdrawal limits on all the cards we had, before taking the Chilean Pesos to exchange into US dollars in downtown Santiago the next morning (it’s impossible to get dollars in Argentina and the Argentinians aren’t allowed to withdraw cash abroad, they have to pay by debit card if they holiday abroad). The difference in exchange rate was huge, one dollar got you 5 pesos at the official exchange rate, but you could get up to 8 or 9 pesos on the ‘blue’ market.

We took the bus from Santiago de Chile to Mendoza, a trip that was supposed to take 5 hours through the Andes mountains (and passing near the highest mountain in the southern and western hemispheres). It took an extra 3 hours due to a long wait near the border due to roadworks. By this time it was dark and we couldn't see anything out of our window except a long tail of headlights snaking up the mountains. We arrived at 2.30 am and jumped in a cab to go to our friend Facundo's who lives in the centre of Mendoza and who proposed to host us during our stay.  We left Flora's wallet in the cab that night and we spent most of our first day going to the police to get a police declaration for the loss of her credit and debit card.

We spent almost a week in Mendoza, enjoying the famous wine and one afternoon we visited a famous bodega (winery) and took a tour, learning the process and tasting the grapes from the vine, as well as more wines. We also visited the Museo Fader nearby. Fader used to live there and there were some original wall paintings on display.

We also had a wonder around the Craft stalls in Plaza Independencia and the food market, Mercado Central (well this is the name of all the markets who are in the centre of South American towns and there is usually a Plaza Independencia too). On top of that we went to the biggest park of the city (behind Avenida Boulogne Sur Mer) and worked a bit on our Spanish there in the sun (its always sunny in Mendoza, not a cloud in the sky for 300 days a year).


We had the chance to drink two very common drinks that the Argentinians like to drink all the time (besides the wine that is). First was the Maté, a strong herbal tea and the other one was Fernet and Coke, an Italian digestive, also made with herbs.



For our last evening, we went to see Fernanda's dance show (Facu's girlfriend). It was very good and the modern-jazz dance was very creative, especially the scene with all the girls wearing flippers . We also loved the latino-spanish "musica antigua" used in the part.

Even if Mendoza is a small city, with not so many things to do, we enjoyed the food, the wine and lived like Argentinians for a week. This means than we went to bed late, had long siestas between 1pm and 4.30pm when everything was closed and even watched some premier league football (with Tottenham beating Man City 3-2 and hearing the commentator saying “Gooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaalllll!” for 30 seconds without taking any breath).