MENDOZA

I left La Plata at night (this time I went for the classy cama section on the planta baja) and arrived at Mendoza the next morning, where I proceeded to hang out with Fulbrightera friend Lilli, who is way awesome and one of my favorite people around, and happened to have a whole extra room in her house free! My stay in Mendoza would be gratis.

We went over to the big public park near her house and I met her neighbor and a few friends. We layed out on a big blanket, drank mate and played guitars. Lilli´s friends were really nice and really cool.

Soon thereafter I went over to the bus terminal to meet up with Marcela my Chilean sister! YAY!!! You dedicated blog-readers will remember her from my last visit to Chile and from my estancia en Valdivia, Chile (po) (weón). She arrived and the familia feliz reunited! I gave her the iPod she had ordered from my last trip to the US and she jumped up and down and carried it around like her baby. Haha yeah!!

After that we went on the hunt for this restaurant that´s actually a house where a family cooks up a big dinner and guests eat with the family, whatever they´re having. The rumor is that they have the very best food in the whole city. We tracked down the place but it was closed, so we took a recommendation from the super-nice cabby who took us to a place with famous lomitos (for the Rowleys: ok, think of a Bumstead with fried egg and steak and other stuff in it, with amaaazing fresh French bread that tastes almost like crusty Angel food cake). The sandwich I got could have won a Nobel prize. I ate it in self-defense. It could have eaten me. Photographic evidence will be up soon on my Picasa site (at right on this bloggy). Lilli had been on one of those lemon juice fasts (trying to get her body to get rid of all that... well... Argentinean food) and she kindly broke her fast in honor of her esteemed guests, who were dead set on eating like chanchos.

After that we we stopped at an artesan ice cream place (the best in Mendoza, according to the cabby, whose opinion I trusted). It indeed was the best ever! We had a sundae between the three of us, then three shakes in succession (also between the three of us, with straws). Marcela and I had made a pact before the night started that we would return to our respective homes rolling like giant bowling-ball-people. I am a man of my word.

After that, Lilli and I went to her favorite bar, a place run by two of her friends. It was a really cozy, artistic place. The kind of place where the owner invites you into the kitchen to talk about the better points of empanadas with the chef (as we did).

The next day, Marcy and I went to the mall and I got a new poofy down vest and Marcy looked for iPod accessories and bought some chocolate and stuff to bring back. I took her to the bus station and watched ride of into the sunset (figuratively - it was about 3pm).

Lilli and I had tea and played music and philosophized and talked about grad schools and lesson plans and came up with a detailed plan of how we would start our own hostel/bar and what it would be like and how we could make it have our kind of vibe. We could link it to a local NGO, we could make a chain of them, we could use our contacts around here to... well, I shouldn´t reveal our entire business plan just yet. Suffice it to say it would be sweet!

After that we were off to a ciclo de cine run by the university in this giant and amazing theater, with a friend of Lil´s. It was a terrible, trite, ridiculous movie about Elijah Wood solving a serial killer mystery in Oxford, England by using...mathematical calculations? I should reveal that one of my favorite pastimes with good friends is to see terrible movies and be the only people in the theater who laugh. Mystery Science Theater style.

I´m now in the bus station in Mendoza, about to ¨study GREs¨ (draw a comic book of my trip), having eaten a heaping helping of amazing oatmeal, spinach salad with almonds and soy sauce, orange juice, coffee, and a delicious pastry.

If Lilli ran a hostel, I would stay there for a long time.