I am writing this post from beautiful moonlight Mendoza, Argentina. I would have posted about the journey beforehand, but the last two times I did that, it ended up not happening, first becuase of a freakish week-long snowstorm, then becuase the bus was full, so I couldn’t get a ticket. So, I didnīt want to jinx the trip again by posting before I actually got here, especially since it was getting down to the last hour. My three month tourist card expires tomorrow, so if I hadnīt made it, I would be facing a very steep fine right now.
Mendoza is the first big town you reach after going through the closest pass through the Andes from Santiago. If you have ever been to Boulder, Colorado, just imagine a copy of that town where you can actually afford *everything* in the town (even those really big geodes and authentic looking Buddha statues). Yes, everything in this town is incredibly cheap. Stuff costs about the same amount in pesos as it does in dollars, but an Argentinian peso is about a third of a dollar. So itīs easy to figure out if you are paying a fair price : you just look for somethign that would look right if you paid for it in dollars. Plus at the end of the day you have only spent a third of the money you would have at home.
But wait, thereīs a catch. You see Mendoza is actually vey dangerous. The sidewalk is very uneven, and I have almost twisted my ankle literally three times, becuase I was staring at one of the many ravishing young women and stepped over about a 6 inch drop in the pavement. Luckily, my tongue wasnīt hanging out at the time like that womanizing wolf in the cartoons, becuase I would have bit it really hard when my mouth snapped shut.
Mendoza has lots of plazas and pedestrian malls like those pictures of Europe, and you can see the mountains from this town too. I never realized how nice it is to see forested hills or craggy mountains from anywhere in a city until I returned to Charleston from Chicago for the first time.
I spent most of the day walking around, then I took a tour of two wineries. One was really big, and as usual with this kind of stuff, the thing that captivated everyoneīs attention was the the bottling and packing line. As part of the line, individuall bottles were filled, placed in bloxes, and then the boxes were stacked 6×6x6 on a palette and shrink wrapped, all completely automatically. They also had a wine testing chemistry lab. You can tell it was a laboratory becuase there was a man in a white coat doing absolutely nothing. (Zing!)
I at a delicious steak on the pedestrian mall, and now I am going to go to the central plaza and see what happens there after dark , before I catch a bus back at midnight.
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