I'm at home. West Lafayette, Indiana. It's a good twenty degrees warmer and far more humid and so I'm kind of wishing I were back in the southern hemisphere. Ugh. Anyway, I wrote the following earlier, but haven't gotten around to posting it until now (obviously):
Okay. Wow. It’s been a busy week. I’m back in the U.S., writing this in the Miami airport while waiting for my connection to Indy, but let’s start back where I left off. Sidenote: This is going to be a super long blog post because I'm too lazy to divide it up. Sorry.
Sunday night we (C., S., S., M., C., and I) took an omnibus to Mendoza, and we arrived Monday morning. Somewhere along the way our group had acquired a Costa Rican girl (A.) who was traveling alone to and back from Mendoza at the same time as us, and we ended up hanging out with her the whole time we were there. So anyway, on Monday the seven of us decided to do this bike-and-wine thing, suitably titled, um, "bikes and wines" :
So we rode down to the end of the route – me holding everyone up, as usual, with my substandard bicycling skills – and then started going to the bodegas on the way back. Unfortunately, the “bike” part took a substantial amount of time, decreasing drastically the “wine” time we had, and we therefore only ended up going to two bodegas and then lunch (at like, four), and didn’t get to go to the museum one or the chocolate one, because we had to return the bikes by six. Oh well. It has been pointed out to me bikes and wines in equal proportions would probably not have been too successful a combination anyway. I guess one of the groups before us that went to Mendoza had to call the bike-and-wine place and get them to send a van because the wine rendered them incapable of the whole biking thing, haha. Anyway, here are some pictures:
But anyway, it was interesting. They probably told us lots of things I don’t remember now about how long various types of wine sit in a barrel and then the bottle and so on, sorry if you desperately wanted to know. We were shown around and such. There were exciting underground places with dusty bottles and dark lighting and creaky wooden stairs and barrels that felt like they could have been part of a scene from National Treasure or something of the sort:
So that was Monday. Tuesday we did this bus-tour-through-the-mountains thing, which was nice, I guess. We rented boots and traipsed around in the snow a bit. Went to Puente del Inca, saw some handicraft things, etc. After the semi-intense/painful bicycle excursion it was nice to not actually have to do anything. When we got back we wandered around for a long time trying to find the place we were supposed to do a wine tasting at, only we ended up getting there just as they were closing, and there had been some misinformation regarding the timing to begin with, so that didn’t work out. We ended up just going to a place close by and ordering a couple of bottles and delicious tapas. Photos again:
First, a couple of the mountains -
So Wednesday we paraglided off the Andes. Yes, you read that correctly. It was a one-at-a-time thing, because each of us went together with the guy, so it ended up taking all morning. I went first, because I was smallest, and apparently as it gets later the wind picks up, so they didn’t want me to I guess be blown off into the distance never to be found again or something. So yeah, we all sort of sat down, and then were one at a time kidnapped in a mysterious SUV and taken up the mountain. By which I mean, uh, the guy drove me up and up and up this terrifying rugged bumpy twisty path off of which we surely would have fallen to our deaths had he inadvertently jerked the wheel left. That was definitely the worst part; the actual paragliding was not. So yeah, we finally reached the landing, and he intimidatingly told me how I was supposed to run towards the edge of this cliff and then just, um, keep running. Running in and of itself is a scarring experience, but running without ground under you seemed like it would be particularly unpleasant. It worked out okay, though. The parachute ended up working, and then we were just sort of floating around amidst the Andes, above Mendoza, which was crazy. We were only up there for maybe ten minutes or so, but it was pretty darn cool. I was vaguely unsuccessful at the whole landing thing, though – apparently one’s feet, not knees, are supposed to hit the ground. Oops.
So anyway, Mendoza was nice, mountains and things, and the hostel was really clean and happy and communal feeling, and I forgot to mention before that Wednesday was also the 9th of July, which is the Argentine Independence Day. So when we got back to the hostel they’d organized this whole lunch thing for the people staying at the hostel, even preparing special stuff for the vegetarians, and everything was decked out in sky-blue and white, the colors of the flag. So that was really fun. We talked with some random Irish folk who were traveling around South America and learned the fantastic term “smirting,” which is what people do outside of bars in Ireland now that smoking is prohibited inside them, and which is a portmanteau of smoking and flirting, if you hadn’t already guessed.
But yeah, the hostel staff were super nice in general. I guess the girl (Romela?) was only nineteen, but she seemed ridiculously mature for that (also, her dad was the chef for the lunch thing). I didn’t actually talk to her much; mostly I talked with Guillermo (aka Guille aka Billy, haha), who’s a 23-year-old law student and works the night shift at the hostel, and had kind of hilarious conversations about how everybody hates Porteños and how he thinks they should just eliminate the h from the Spanish language because it’s always silent and how everyone always thinks he sounds Dutch when he speaks English. It was fun. Photos!
The hostel's sign.
Wednesday night we took the bus back to Buenos Aires, and we arrived back Thursday morning – our last full day there. I think I just spent the day packing? I’m a little perplexed, that seems like too much time, but I can’t think of what else I would have done…
Oh, right, I looked online to see if there were still tickets left for the Babasónicos (I’ve mentioned them previously) concert that night, because I'd realized that the concert was actually only after the goodbye party, so I could conceivably do both. Anyway, when I found out that there were indeed tickets left for the Thursday show, I went on a surprisingly difficult quest to figure out whether the others who were going had tickets for Campo B or Campo D (within the halves, it was just general admission). So yeah, I IMed C., but apparently L. had his ticket, and he’d lost his phone so he didn’t have L.’s number. I then IMed M., who wasn’t going to the concert but who told me she had L.’s number. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the phone number of L. who works for COPA, not L. the fellow student, so I ended up having a really awkward conversation with Daniel, the director of the summer program, in which there was a brief case of mistaken identity mixed with me just having the wrong number. I informed M. of this grievous error on her part, and she gave me the number of L2, who was also going to the concert and who was friends with L., and therefore sure to have her number. So I texted L2, to no avail, and finally ended up calling him and getting L.’s number a while later. I called L. a couple of times, but nobody answered and I also ran out of money on my phone, so I went out to buy another phone card.
At this point I also went to the post office to see if I could get stamps to mail postcards to the people who’d sent me things (because I was too lazy to write more of them than that, and by “that” I mean “two”). This took more time than anticipated, because I had to do the whole draw-a-number-and-wait-until-you’re-called thing. Then instead of giving me stamps the guy at the counter just sort of took the postcards and some money. I’m assuming they will be sent. Hopefully.
So yeah. After that, I tried calling L. again, and it worked! I found out they had tickets for Campo B, so I went back to the apartment and back to the website, only it turned out that they had stopped selling tickets online an hour previously. I journeyed to Luna Park, the venue, to see what I could do (I took Subte D and connected to Subte B, which ended right there, more or less, if anyone cares). After waiting in line for a while, I finally got me a ticket, which was super exciting. So yeah, that’s what I spent a lot of time on Thursday doing. When I got back, it was almost time to head off to the goodbye party, so I did.
The thing, they had told us, was at a bar on Paraná, between Santa Fe and Marcelo T. de Alvear. What they neglected to mention was that, strangely, it was unmarked. (I fear COPA is actually a branch of the mafia. These suspicions have not yet been confirmed, though). Luckily, Daniel handily popped out of the doorway as I was walking by for the second time, and I did not end up being lost for very long. It was kind of fun. I hung around from 7 - 8:30 (which is how long it was supposed to last), and said bye to people and such. Including Diego. Who told me to e-mail him, which was a dangerous thing to say on his part, because I will probably do it eventually whether or not he actually wants me to. M. accused me of being creepy and trying to hang around him too much, but I wasn’t, not really, I don't think. I feel like she’s one of those people who’s always friendly and likes everyone (I wish I could do that…), and so what she doesn’t quite understand is that he was one of maybe five max people who I legitimately liked on this trip, so I wasn't so much stalking him as trying to spend time around the people I liked rather than ones I hated, which makes sense, right? Oh well, whatever.
Anyway, that gathering provided appropriate closure, etc., etc., and so the five of us who were going to the concert (C., L., L2, T., and I) headed out. Even though it was 8:30, and the concert was supposed to be at 9, C. and L2 decided they needed to stop and eat, and were due to some miscommunication convinced that the opener would last until 10:30 or so. After pizza, we Subted over to Luna Park, got there a little after ten, and of course of course of course the actual concert had already begun, which was kind of sad.
What we saw of it was fun, though. Their songs seemed really, really short in real life, and that wasn’t really helped by the fact that they rushed like crazy on “Irresponsables,” but it was still good. It was so exciting that I actually knew like, four or five of the songs they did. “Y Que” was definitely better live than on the CD. I was also glad that they played “Putita” because I’d recently been obsessing about the first line and how well constructed it is, just the way the vowels line up and such, it’s great. I bought a t-shirt, which had better fit, because apparently all the t-shirts they were selling came in only one size (well, one for girls and one for guys), which was kind of perplexing. After the concert, we wandered for a bit and then headed over to “Acabar,” which is a bar that has like, board games and such on all the tables. It was a fun place. I lost stupidly to C. at Connect Four even though I was sober and he wasn’t entirely. Tsk tsk. I should pay more attention. Afterwards, others headed to a boliche, but L., K., and I just went home. I never ended up going to a boliche while in Argentina, but I think I’m quite all right with that.
Okay. Friday. Slept in, went and bought a couple of last minute things, packed a few last minute things, etc., etc. Took a cab to the Plaza San Martín, where all of us were meeting to take a bus to the airport. I fell asleep, but apparently there was a wreck and like, a dead body on the side of the road which caused substantial delay. Yikes. Anyway, we eventually arrived at the airport. I hung out with C. and J. in their gate (they weren’t taking the group flight), a few away from mine, because I didn’t feel like dealing with lots of people. Then, I mean, the flight, through which I slept. When I got to Miami, I turned on my cell phone and found out I had a voicemail from American Airlines saying that due to a caterers’ strike in Buenos Aires, I would not receive my requested vegetarian meal. (Apparently they had called the house with this message as well, as my parents had already relayed it to me.) The perplexing part was that I’m pretty sure the only meal the flight involved was breakfast, which consisted of a muffin, an apple, and raisins. Unless I completely slept through something else, but that seems unlikely. Hm.
But yeah, that’s that, I guess. It’s strange that it’s over. I tried to talk in Spanish at the Buenos Aires airport but was only somewhat successful, and most of the people ended up switching over to English, because they could. Oh well. An hour from now I’ll be on my way to Indianapolis, and a few hours after that I’ll be at home. Wow.
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