Che Familia!

I am currently in Wine City: Mendoza, Argentina. Mendoza was ranked the 7th or 8th wine capital of the world I read somewhere and it definetely lives up to it. Friday we arrived late to our hostal because the bus ride took 12 hours when it was only supposed to take 7. The great thing about our hostal though is that we get a free glass of wine every night .

Saturday Heidi, Sam and I rented bikes and did the "route of the vineyards." Route of the vineyards is a road that has 12 stops on it; most of the stops are vineyards..obviously. We started at about 12pm and visited three vineyards, one olive oil factory and one chocolate/liquor factory. At each place we paid about $3 to get a tour and a tasting of 3 to 4 wines. Malbec is the typical red wine of Argentina grown from the Malbec grape. My favorite stop was the first vineyard, owned by a French woman who names all her wines after constellations. Her bottles all have maps of the stars on them. My other favorite stop was the chocolate place at the end; we sampled chocolate and finished the bikeride off with a shot of absinthe. At night, we went out dancing and stayed out until 6am.

Sunday, we went to an all you can eat buffet that Heidi´s host dad recommended we visit. It was amazing! We ate until we were so full that all we could do afterwords was go and lay in the grass at a park. We met some nice local skater boys there. They invited us to a grill out at their apartment and convinced us to stay an extra day.

Monday, we went with our new Argentine friends to a spot near the river. We had a grill out and swam in the river. When it started to get colder out we snuck into the hot springs nearby. They felt so good; there were a series of pools ranging in temperatures. I couldn´t even put my whole leg in the last one was SO hot.

The next day we left, back to Chile. It was another memorable weekend in Argentina.