Mendoza and first days in Buenos Aires

Readers, it has been far too long without an update: I’ve been in Argentina for THREE WEEKS without a single post about it (luckily I can change the time stamp on these posts so it looks like I've been more diligent)! So, to catch you all up to speed, I’m going to do a few brief (for me!) posts about what I’ve been up to since arriving.

We left Santiago in a bit of a rush on Friday afternoon, right after my classes, and headed to Mendoza - the famous wine region of Argentina. I think I was expecting the entire area to be like our experience at Matetic, which is of course near impossible. Instead, Mendoza is about the business of wine; at times it almost felt industrial. (That said, there are over 1,300 wineries in the region, and our tour took us to 3 of them, so I’m providing you with quite a limited view). Our tour was nicely balanced and included: a large, industrial company which does a lot of private labels; a small organic vineyard which still uses a horse to plow the field; and a vineyard focused on small batch production for the international market. Afterwards we had a ridiculous lunch and tons of wine... so delicious!

In Argentina!

Lopez was definitely a commercial Bodega (winery - not corner store!)

A horse plowing the fields


Maryin a wine cask:


The beginning of our luch spread:



Sunday we got to Buenos Aires, got into our apartment and met our roommate – Sonja, a design engineer from Toronto who is thinking about moving down to Argentina permanently.

My apartment in Buenos Aires is in a neighborhood called Once, which is kinda like the Lower East Side in that it was once a heavily Jewish neighborhood, and now is full of whole-sale shops. There is still a pretty big orthodox and Lubovitch presence, but otherwise BA’s wealthy Jews have left for greener pastures. Once is what one of my professor’s called “the real BA” – dirty, loud, gritty. One day walking home I saw 2 dogs gnawing at what must have been a cow’s femur from one of the local butcher shops. No one around me seemed to notice. Best part: Sonja said she had seen the same femur (with maybe a little more raw meat on it) 2 blocks away about 5 hours earlier. Meaning that dogs had been dragging around a huge part of a dead cow around my neighborhood for half the day and no one had put an end to it; probably, no one else even noticed. So, yeah, the neighborhood is dirty, loud and gritty. We have porno shops and neighborhood drunk guys. My apartment building is none of these things, though. It’s an adorable building with about 4 apartments and 2 resident turtles.

Once borders an old, wealthy neighborhood: Recoletta, which is where my school is. So on the first day I was a very good tourist and went to the Recoletta cemetery, famous for its mausoleums and also because Evita Peron is buried there.

The rest of the week was spent getting used to the new school, new city, new apartment. I ate Argentinian beef and tried to get used to the Argentinian accent (yo = jo, calle = cashe). We also went to go see “This is It!” the Michael Jackson movie. Unlike Scrooge, it was in English.

Even the malls have beautiful fountains: