We arrived in Mendoza Friday morning and after moving our things into our hostel we did a little boutique shopping nearby until 2pm when we started our vineyard/wine tour. We visited one large, commercial winery called Bodega López and one other, smaller winery that makes only organic wines. While there we got to taste test 4 different types of wine, 2 red, 1 white, and one champagne. For those interested, one of the best known wines made in Argentina and the most popular here is called Malbec and it's made at Bodega López. That night we went to another hostel nearby and ate an asado (¡riquísimo!) and stuck around for a bit after when the 3rd floor of the hostel turned into a dance floor.
Some of us got home around 1am (others didn't go to bed til after 3) and were soon awakened at 8am by the leaders of "Tour of the Andes" pounding on our door. But don't let me get ahead of myself... background info: the activities package we signed up for when we checked-in to the hostel included a 2-night stay at the hostel, the tour of the wineries, the asado, AND a guided tour to the mountains. We planned on talking to the front desk to schedule the tour for Sunday when we knew everything else would be closed. Unfortunately, no one took the initiative to talk to this person (nor did we have a schedule of times for the tour)... needless to say, we woke up to these tour guides telling us to get our behinds out of bed and out the door in DOS MINUTOS or they would leave us and keep our money.
Luckily, the tour was really fun and beautiful and we got to nap a bit in the bus on the way to the mountains. We stopped at a few scenic points along the way, including some ancient Incan ruins, shopped a bit at some Indian, artsy stands (I finally bought a mate, see photo =) and ate a homecooked lunch in a cabin at the foot of a mountain. We would have loved to see the tallest mountain in the Occidental hemisphere, Aconagua, but the weather was so gloomy (it was cloudy and snowing/hailing as we drove higher up) we weren't able to see too far.
That night we came back to the hostel, got some much needed sleep, went out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner (which was actually quite tasty), came back to the hostel around 12am and went to sleep again soon after. On Sunday we woke up, checked out by 10am and wandered around the entire city until we found something that was open... the shopping mall (seriously, almost everything here is closed on Sundays). While there we stopped by the movie theater and saw New York I Love You (a really weird/interesting/artsy/indie movie that I don't particularly recommend unless, of course, you're into that kind of stuff...) and of course, being a group of girls as it were, we did a little window shopping =)
Around 7pm we went back to the hostel where I promptly fell asleep on the couch in the commons area (where I'm fairly sure pictures worthy of blackmail were taken... thanks guys) and we left for the omnibus terminal around 8pm. Our bus left at 9pm that night and got into Córdoba around 8am Monday morning. Luckily, I slept fairly well in my "semicama" (which is more like a airplane seat/recliner) and since I didn't have any classes to go to the rest of the day on Monday I got to sleep again when I got home. Side note: If you can't tell, I've grown accustomed to getting sleep whenever it happens to be convenient, quite a feat for someone such as myself haha.
So there you have it... my entire weekend summed up in one blog entry. I hope you enjoyed it and, as always, thanks for reading =)
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