Of Malbecs and Mendoza

It's a fairly obvious truism in travel to say that every experience ends up being more mixed than you anticipate. Our time in Mendoza has been no exception. While most of the week brought the sunny-and-75 weather we hoped for, we also experienced several days of the "zondas": a strong wind off the mountains that once or twice a year blows cold air and a cloud of unbelievable dust into the city. Schools were closed for the day, and spirits at the Chilean independence festival next door were considerably dampened by the 50% of your lungs that filled with particles the moment you walked outside. (Although that didn't stop them from dyeing a fountain Koolaid-red and singing songs of freedom all night long.) And while our hostel has brought all the relaxation, comfort, and privacy that we desired for application productivity, a highly unfortunate accident involving a patio chair, a snagged charge cord, and Brianne's computer making abrupt contact with a slate floor left us in this situation:

Bottom: Brianne's netbook, completely dismantled. Not pictured: Us, completely freaking out. Top: Max, our friendly hostel worker, who also happens to come from a family of computer technicians. After the dismantle didn't solve the problem, Max eventually called his uncle, who gave me the opportunity to use the word "tio," took away Brianne's netbook, replaced the hard drive, and - because our situation wasn't pathetically comical enough - installed a Spanish-language version of Windows XP. The whole ordeal felt a little like this:

We decided to console ourselves for the lost productivity by compounding it with a six-hour-long wine tasting, followed by a two-hour-long siesta. And I have to say that where wine and olives are concerned, Mendoza has entirely lived up to our expectations. We sampled wines at three very different wineries, ranging from fabulously wealthy to family-run organic. We tried two completely new varieties of wine (Bonarda and Moscatel de Alejandria), learned that your first sip of wine should be to adjust the acidity in your mouth and not to taste, and took far too many pictures of wine bottles. I've included just a few (relatively speaking), as well as a final photo of our lunch spread at the end of the day.

It was a gorgeous end to our time in Mendoza, and though we're not as far along with our graduate applications as we hoped, we're making peace with taking them along for the next step of the trip. Tomorrow we board a bus back to Chile, the beginning of a long adventure down south to an organic farm on the Bay of Metri, where we'll be WWOOFing for the next couple of weeks. In light of our week in Argentina, I'm trying not to draw too many advance conclusions from the local weather report of month-long rain and highs in the mid-50s. Mary Oliver says you should always leave room for the unimaginable, and from smashed laptops to spectacular vistas, this trip has already had a fair amount of the surprising about it. I'll leave you with a couple of photos from the bus ride to Mendoza, which will hopefully be repeated on our ride tomorrow. Wish us luck.