la nueva porteña: HEAVY ON THE WINE, LIGHT ON THE BLUE

I just got back from Mendoza this morning, and it wasn’t an easy trip—a 16 hour bus ride there and an 18 hour bus ride back (the trip is only supposed to be about 14 hours, but my experiences tell me delays are pretty common). Our group of six girls (Gaby, Francesca, Robyn, Janie, Victoria and I ) arrived in Mendoza early Friday afternoon. After checking into to Monkey Hostel, Gaby, Francesca and I split up with the other girls in order to go paragliding.

The whole paragliding experience was not nearly as scary as I had expected. You did get a bit of an adrenaline rush when jumping off the side of the mountain, but once up in the air, paragliding was quite relaxing. It moved fairly slowly, and I got to soak up the beautify mountains (I think they were the Andes, but they could have been the Sierras) that surrounded me. Approximately every minute my paragliding instructor who I was strapped to kept asking me if I was okay. It seemed a little strange, but upon my arrival safely on the ground I found out just way he was doing this—about 1 in 10 first-time paragliders get sick. I was fine, but my friend Gaby was not so fortunate…I’ll leave it at that.

Saturday was my favorite day since I arrived here in Argentina. The six of us girls plus Mike and Adam (two other IFSA boys) and Flal and Nath (two French boys I met here in Buenos Aires) all headed out of the city toward Maipu where we rented bikes at Mr. Hugo’s. From there we biked down a beautiful tree-lined street (mountain views off to the sided, of course) as we went from vineyard to vineyard. The highlight was our lunch at Bodega Vistantes where we sat on a patio next to a lake with views of the vineyard in the distance. Great food and great company!

Totally and completely exhausted post-biking tour of the vineyards we got back to the hostel around 8 PM and everyone pretty much crashed immediately. We then had a pretty lazy Sunday before getting on the bus at 4:00 PM. I absolutely LOVED Mendoza—it was a nice break from the big city—but come Sunday I was ready to get back home to BA. It’s amazing how going a way for a few days makes you realize just how at home you really are. I sure have fallen hard for Buenos Aires!

That's Francesca with either the Sierras or the Andes in the background--we weren't quite sure...

There goes Gaby!

A picture of paragliding from taken from my paragliding contraption.

Biking with Gaby, mountains in the background--a pretty impressive view.

The beautiful tree-line road that we biked down to get from bodega to bodega.

The group at the Bodega Familia di Tommaso.

This vault like-thing was previously used to store huge quantities of wine while it underwent the transformation from grape juice to wine. It's now used to store wine bottles at the perfect temperature--just like a huge wine vault.

Wine at the Bodega Familia di Tommaso. They export a malbec to the U.S. where it costs $25 USD. Here the same bottle costs 25 argentine pesos (1/4 of the price)!