Mendoza, Argentina

This weekend I tried to pack all of Argentina into two days, which obviously was not enough time—but we did do a lot in 48 hours. I went with 5 friends to Mendoza, which is about 7 hours by bus from Viña, over the Andes. It’s different from Valparaíso in that it’s very flat, in a desert, bigger and more cosmopolitan. I liked it a lot because there were big trees lining every street, beautiful plazas and lots of people out all the time.

The Mendoza region is known for its wine, so one thing we did was take a bus (probably the hardest part of the trip was figuring out how to catch this bus) to Maipu, a town surrounded by vineyards. We went to a bodega/museum and had a short tour of the vineyard and museum, then got to taste a wine they make there—amazingly this was all free; Argentina in general was really cheap!

Another typically Argentinean thing we did was see some tango at a dinner and performance place. It was really intense! Also there was singing and at the end the singer called up one person from each table to sing karaoke with him…so my friend Alysha impressed everyone with her Spanish and singing skills. We learned a song of which afterwards we could only remember the first line: “Por una cabeza!” Other Argentinean experience: had a tasty steak. It was good but I was more impressed by the large amounts of delicious bread we got at restaurants and the hostel. Argentines definitely love their meat, though; there were lots of outdoor restaurants, so walking down the street we could see people devouring steaks all around us. That was a difference from Chile. Also I think Mendoza has the most dangerous sidewalks of any city I know: there are 3-foot deep trenches running along between the sidewalks and the streets in most places (for water, although there was no water in them), plus random deep holes in other places. A friend of one of my friends, who’s studying in Mendoza, said she had seen at least 3 people fall in. South America is different...

And the other thing we did, which I had always wanted to do: paragliding! I got to fly over the precordillera, the foothills of the Andes. I was surprised that I wasn’t afraid at all once I was actually up in the air: only the running off the cliff part was a little scary (I didn’t have to do any work: my guide was sitting behind me and controlled everything). It was beautiful and peaceful.

Returning yesterday, we crossed the border again on top of the Andes surrounded by snow. The road was really twisty in parts! There were lots of pretty, skinny waterfalls coming down through the mountains because of melting snow. So…the little slice of Argentina that I saw was great and I wish I could easily have spent a whole week just in Mendoza.

10 Unrelated, Odd Things

1) On Wednesday nights, I walk to my poetry class in the Art school at the end of a short street in Viña. This week I noticed a life-size pickup truck made entirely of cardboard parallel parked in a row of normal cars on the street. I assume it’s an art project.
2) My host dad and the food he aquires: the family and I are currently working on finishing a wheel of artesan goat cheese that he drove an hour or more into the country to get, and which I estimate weighs at least 10 lbs. He also got a giant bag of at least 100 avocados for really cheap somewhere (I just found out that half an avocado has 22% of your DV of fat, oops!! That’s a lot for a fruit!! That also must be why they’re so delicious).
3) I saw my television journalism professor on UCV channel 18 one night this week, and I didn’t even realize he actually did reporting. My favorite was hearing the report about the vice presidential debate because of the way he pronounced “Sarah Palin” and “Joe Biden.”
4) The spanish translation of the title of the movie “Lost in Translation” is “Perdidos en Tokio”.
5) For our Spanish class, which is all people from our program, we have to make a video using Chilean spanish. Ours is like the Frog Prince, but with a dog instead of a frog, because we’re using the cultural fact that there are lots of dogs in streets. So we found a friendly dog and taped some interactions with him that we’re going to edit into a coherent movie, hopefully. We got some weird looks from Chileans when we were taping each other talking to a stray dog!
6) In my poetry class with Chileans, our readings so far have included Ezra Pound, Italo Calvino, Charles Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot, all in Spanish. It’s difficult and kind of strange, but probably my favorite class—especially because the professor gets REALLY excited about what he’s saying.
7) When my host parents explain something to me, they like to use whatever may be on the table as props, like tonight they were telling me how when they were little they would buy watermelons at fruit stands in the countryside, and the people selling them would cut a triangle out of it and let you taste it to see if it was good before you bought it. My host mom used a tub of margarine to stand in for the watermelon and then my host dad explained it to me again using a roll of paper towels—they do a good job making sure I understand what they’re talking about :)
8) Often, when I tell a Chilean that my name is Hannah, they’ll look confused for a second and then say, “Ah, Hannah Montana.” This happens more frequently with the 10 to 13-year-olds at my school placement, but not infrequently with people my age and older!
9) In my TV journalism class, there are three exchange students: me, a girls from France and a girl from Germany. One week we had to make a short video with a plot, and the three of us were in a group with four Chileans. Our storyline was that these three foreign students are wandering around looking for the journalism school. We ask three Chilean students in French, German and English, “Where’s the journalism university?” Two of them look confused, but one guy understands the word “University” which is similar in all 4 languages, and he leads there (and gets the gringas). It was ridiculous and fun. The plaza is called Miraflores, which literally means Lookflowers, so we called it “Lost in Miraflowers.”
10) The only thing I can think of for a 10th is that on Saturday I went with American friends to a tapas restaurant for our friend’s birthday, and one thing we got was called Chorrillana: a huge plate of french fries topped with slices of beef and scrambled quail eggs. I don’t know if this is Chilean but it is certainly delicious.

The picture is of a fountain in Viña by the ocean.