Mendoza - Wine Capital of Argentina

Trip Start Jul 25, 2007
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Trip End Ongoing


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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

From the Capital of Chocolate to the Capital of wine..... yes Michelle is in her element!  In a place called Mendoza at the moment for 3days.  Really cool place and very laid back.  It took 18hours on the bus from Bariloche to here so we were glad to get off the bus after that length of time.  It didnīt help matters that there was this annoying German one on the bus sitting beside us who wanted the bus driver to stop every 20 minutes for her fag break. She thought that speaking very sloooooooooooow english that he would understand her and he would stop for her. Zes, zin muy wuntry ze busen drvier ztops every zwentty minutten fur zi fag... doesnīt happen here though, the drivers drive for 12 hours straight on each shift.  She kept getting up every 5 minutes from her seat, bringing her bags with her everywhere she went on the bus, then taking out plastic bags to play with and crumpling them up.  Not the nicest noise to hear at half three in the morning.  Anyways, we can tell you that our irish is improving greatly over here Wine bottles approaching to be corked
Wine bottles approaching to be corked
 !  We thought that the German one would of thought that we didnīt speak English if we spoke irish the whole way on the bus.  So we thought that we had seen the last of her after that journey, feck it when we reached our hostel she was there.  She roared over at us and said īzu mist ze total ecilpse of ze moon last nachten on de busenī.  Must keep improving on the Gaeilge! 
Anyways, we did a winery tour yesterday to 2 wineries in Mendoza, one industrial and the other a more traditional and labour intensive one.  They mostly produce malbec wine here which didnīt really suit us when it came to the wine tasting... must go to Chile for Merlot!  We got a small sample of wine to taste in a glass.  Michelle, being the professional sipped it along with everybody else..... I knocked it back so I had to ask for a new glass to get a real taste of it.  Headed from there to a boutique olive factory, where we were shown how olive oil and extra virgin olive oil was made... interesting enough! 
Walked the city today.  Full of small parks and wide streets with about 30 Gunney Shops (Pound City Shops) on each block.  Streets are very wide because in the 1870īs there was a huge earthquake that leveled the city, so the planners decided that when rebuilding the city that they would leave the streets very wide so that the rubble would fall onto the streets but leave a gap in the middle to allow traffic to get through.  We still havenīt gotten used to the fact that everywhere in Argentina closes between 1pm and 5pm in the afternoon... driving us cracked!  Even the water features in the parks turn off at 1pm for a 4hour break.  Madness!  Heading on to San Juan tomorrow to the parks that have lunar valleys and where some of the worlds oldest dinosaur fossils were found.  Canīt wait to try the noise of a dinosaur, since I was so good at doing whale noises.... more like a distressed cow calving.
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