Argentina: Buenos Aires y Mendoza
Went to Buenos Aires two weekends ago, and loved Argentina so much that I decided to go again this past weekend to Mendoza.
Buenos Aires:
Went with Jess, Andria, Angie, and Alex.
LOVE LOVE LOVED this city. It is hard to put my finger on why exactly, but it has this energy about it. General atmosphere-wise, I’d call it the NYC of South America.
Actually, I can pinpoint a few particular things I loved about it:
1) Zapallo (squash). The hostel we stayed at had the most magnificent (and perhaps only) squash jelly I have ever tasted. I could eat entire jars of it every day. Squash and pumpkins were definitely a big thing in Argentina—had pumpkin ravioli the first night there…need I say more?
2) Coffee. We had legit coffee in Buenos Aires. None of Chile’s powdered wannabe coffee.
3) Books. Chile has no publishing companies, so the books are all imported and therefore super expensive. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, has publishing companies. Books were definitely less expensive, though about on par with those in the US.
4) Cheap food. First night there, we had been traveling all day without much sustenance. So, we went to a pasta place and decided to splurge a little…ordered nachos and a bottle of wine to split and our individual dishes of pasta (mine was the highly-acclaimed pumpkin ravioli in a 4-cheese sauce)…came to about 12 USD a person. Ridiculously cheap for the quality and quantity of the food. Another highlight restaurant was the Irish Pub…in Argentina.
Basically, we only had 2 full days in Argentina (travel ate up a LOT of time). We spent those days falling in love with the city as we walked through it. Some highlights were La Casa Rosa (the Pink House—it used to be white like the White House, but some president decided he didn’t want to copy the US or something like that, so he pained it red, but then this other president thought it was too Communist so they painted it over with white paint, but it could only tone down the red instead of fully covering it…at least, that’s what Alex told me), the garden (peaceful in the big city), El Museo de Bellas Artes (fine arts museum), the Cathedral, the Obelisco (looks like the Washington Monument), the widest street in the world (not counting freeways), a giant rose sculpture that opens in the day and closes at night, La Boca (colorful little neighborhood full of artisan crafts and where people tangoed in the streets), streets full of shops, and too many plazas and parks to count.
Our hostel was also really cool. We all hung out on the roof terrace and the second night we were there, watched a piano concert/light show. The building across the street was celebrating its 100 year birthday, so the street was closed, a stage was set up, and this guy played the piano. There is a floor of the building called purgatorio “purgatory,” so the music and light show (which was projected on the building itself) related to Dante’s Divine Comedy, starting with hell, then purgatory, then heaven.
Another highlight was making dinner one night in the hostel. Jess, Andria, and I missed cooking, so we made the food and Angie and Alex did the dishes. We settled on making vegetable stir-fry because we were all dying for a meal that wasn’t based solely on meat and bread. We way overestimated the amount of vegetables that we needed, so ended up bingeing on vegetables and pawning off a couple plates on people who came in the kitchen to eat their sad dinner of cereal.
Overall impression: If you find yourself in South America, do yourself a favor and go to Buenos Aires.
Mendoza:
Went with Andria, Beth, and Jess.
When your trip begins with the bus playing cheesy karaoke music, you know that it’ll be an amazingly quirky experience. The bus ride plus customs lasted a whopping 10 hours, which, ironically, is the same amount of time that it takes to fly from the US to Chile. However, between the karaoke, the best worst movie I have ever seen entitled Papa se volvio loco! (Dad went crazy!), and a blast from the past with 90’s music videos, it was fairly entertaining overall.
The first place we went in Mendoza was to the police station…to ask for directions to our hostel. Our hostel, what words can I give to describe it? We passed it at first because it was not marked very well…so we backtracked and saw this dark door on the opposite side of the street, “Uh…what does that sign say? I’m hoping that’s not it…ohh yep, THAT’S our hostel.” Looked pretty sketchy, no one really wanted to go in, but we braved it. It really wasn’t that bad inside, we were greeted by our hostel poet who never sleeps, Gaston. He’s your typical starving artist, and read us one of his poems, inspired by an argument with a friend, of which I will give you a brief translation so you understand the nature of his sheer poetic brilliance.
“I defecated from the passage of the colon of egoism,
I vomited the hatred during fanfare…” You get the picture.
He also found all four of us a four-leaf clover. If he had spent as much time cleaning the bathrooms as he did finding four-leaf clovers for us, the hostel would have been much improved. There was toilet paper for a couple hours of the day, so you learned fast that you needed to steal it when you could…and thus you participated in the vicious cycle. There was an entire colony of flies living on the ceiling of the downstairs shower…but at least there was a shower curtain in that one.
Our actual room was pretty nice, though…we were lucky that we got to share a 4-person room. It was like a 3-day long slumber party…I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. The number of inside jokes we have from Mendoza is innumerable—absolutely adore the girls I went with.
I loved the energy and personality of Buenos Aires, but Mendoza was so much more fun and felt like a mini-vacation. Saturday was spent shopping—we found a chocolate/wine factory and an alfajor factory (alfajor=specialty Argentinian cookie sandwich with dulce de leche in the middle), but the majority of our shopping excursions involved shoes because Mendoza is known for its cheap shoes. Never have I seen so many shoes in one city. There were huge window displays, and we had to attempt to point out to the salespeople which shoe we wanted to try from the window.
The weather was hotter across the cordillera (mountain range), so it was a good thing that helado (ice cream) was about as common as the shoes. We found the most ridickulous (misspelling intended) ice cream cones I have ever seen at La Reinese. They were specially made for a double-scoop, so there were two cups for the scoops of ice cream attached to a regular cone…they looked curiously like male anatomy.
I met a very complimentary old man in La Reinese. He asked me if I was from Germany (sidenote: third time someone has tagged me as a German, but once I was asked if I was Australian because I talked like Olivia Newton-John—go figure). He then proceeded to talk to me about my “belleza”—“You’re beautiful [turning to the workers behind the counter, all male] Isn’t she beautiful?” The guys behind the counter could hardly keep from laughing. He then complimented me on my Spanish, which was far more flattering, though a compliment I don’t think I deserve. At any rate, once he finally got over my “belleza” and found out I was from the US, he started talking to me about Obama and how wonderful it is that he won the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve talked to a few Americans about this, and most people react saying that Obama hasn’t really done anything yet. But everyone in South America has been extremely excited about it and genuinely believe Obama deserves it. My host parents have told me time and time again how much they love Obama. I don’t think that we understand how much it means to other countries around the globe that Obama is our president.
I love the prices of Argentinian food. Between ice cream, Subway, and our homemade vegetable stir-fry (SO good) and chocolate banana pancakes, we spent roughly $5-6 USD on food for one day. Our last night there, we treated ourselves to a meal of steak and wine…Que rico. The steak is really tender in Argentina because the landscape is so flat—the cattle do not develop their muscles and so the meat is better.
The most adventurous part of the trip was rafting. We all had a love-hate relationship with our instructor, whose rugged attractiveness was equal only to how much he wanted us to get soaked. The scenery was gorgeous and looked rather similar to the Southwest US. The river was turquoise and carved a canyon into the reddish rock—perfect day for rafting. We wore these ridiculous blue jumpsuits, orange lifevests, and a white helmet—ready for anything. The start of the ride was lovely and Beth was telling us how much we would thank her for pushing us to go.
Not more than 5 minutes later, we were screaming as water poured into the raft. We were caught in a current and we moved from one side of the raft to the other as it spun around. We had gotten rid of our paddles before because we were supposed to disembark—however, the current had sucked us back in (though we have our suspicions that our guide merely wanted to pretend that we were stuck). There was this guy standing on a rock pointing at us and laughing as we clung to one another and screamed; I hated that man. My one thought of survival was, “Don’t let go of Beth!” We were all almost sobbing because of how shocked we were from the cold water, and apparently at one point I yelled, “Jesus, you have the power to stop this—why aren’t you using it?!?!” But honestly, it was one of my favorite memories from the Mendoza trip, and really hilarious when I look back. We realized how incredibly lame the current actually was when the instructors offered to the people on the other raft to get “caught” in the same current—for fun. Felt more than slightly ridiculous after that.
The rest of the trip was gorgeous and without problem. Our instructor had us all stand up in the boat and put one foot on each edge—the “prueba de vikingos” (Viking test). Rafting was incredibly fun, and incredibly worth it.
We also went out dancing one night, advised where to go by our kind shoe-saleswoman. There was a live band and the Argentinians all knew the words, so that was a really fun environment. Lots of students from the program were in Mendoza this weekend, though we stayed at a few different hostels, but most of us ended up in the same club—purely by chance!
The artisan fairs were also a lot of fun. We bought a few small souvenirs and the biggest cotton candy I have ever seen. The next day, we went to all the major plazas in the city—Italia with it’s gorgeous fountain, Espana with its many colored tiles, Chile with benches decorated for the different regions, and a few others—all with statues of important people. One plaza by the church where we went to Mass had a wooden slide. A child had left notes on it saying that you WOULD fall if you tried to go down…so of course we tried and it was actually really fun and no one got splinters. The trip to Mendoza was full of lots of little quirky, random experiences like that, but those are what made the trip so fun and unique.
Our last night there was also a night to remember. The night we arrived, we checked e-mail and saw that our hostel had said that there was space only for the first night or two…thanks for telling us sooner! We made sure to inquire about our third night every chance we got to make sure we’d have enough time to find another hostel…but I’m pretty sure Gaston just wanted to avoid the whole situation. At any rate, it was our last day there and we returned from our dinner around 12:30…to find that we did not have a room that night. Gaston apologized a lot and said we could sleep on the floor of the lobby—for free. We ended up sleeping in what we called the “fish bowl,” which was the middle room with the TV and couch that was surrounded by glass walls. We didn’t really mind much, especially since we got a free night so ended up paying $12 USD for 3 nights there, and were all able to laugh at it. So great to travel with such an easygoing group! My host parents were not at all surprised…Que fresos los argentinos!
The bus ride back was really long, too, as was customs. We kind of ran into trouble with Andria’s unfinished wood artisan craft and Jess accidentally sort-of kicking the police dog…but we made it back to Vina just fine.
Overall impression: Although we ran into a lot of little frustrations this trip, we had a blast. I would not change any of it!
You know you’re in Argentina when…
1) You get kissing noises from your admirers on the street, rather than the whistle and car honks (or, the car horns that sound like whistles) of Chile.
2) No one has coin money—a minimarket even had a sign that read “No hay moneda—de verdad” (We don’t have coins, it’s true). As an econ minor, I have to wonder how much they have in circulation.
3) The “ll” is pronounced with a “j” sound, which I think is really pretty.
4) You can also hear the Italian influence in people’s speech. However, my host mom says she does not like the way they talk at all...
5) No one respects the stoplights and pedestrian crossings—ten cuidado!
6) The unibrow is not uncommon. However, Argentinian men are known for being “mas hermoso” than the Chileans…if they were, I don’t know where they were hiding.
I'll have to attach pictures later...we're heading out for Chiloe tonight, so I'm a little pressed for time!
