Mendoza - January 24th

The day started with the walk home from the football match.  Actually there isn’t too much to blog about here.  We ended up getting a taxi back to the hostel because the heaven’s opened up again.  We had booked seats under the roof in case of rain, but in the end we could have been on the open terraces and still sat (due to the low turnout) and not got wet for half the price.  But the rain did come eventually.

Because it was after 01:00 when we got back to the hostel we were a bit late getting up the next morning, and by the time we had breakfasted and headed out into town it was after midday.  Due to inconvenient scheduling we had got our two main activities for Mendoza done in a single day (the football became a Mendoza activity when we realised it was the mid-season break in Buenos Aries when we are there, so this was our only chance to catch a match), so we were at a loss as to what to do this time.  There are a lot of excursions to be done from Mendoza, and only half of them involve wine, but we were too tired to go on them.

So basically we ended up just hanging around the town for the day, going to various shops, having a traditional lunch (a Super Pancho, a hot dog, the fast food lunch item in these parts), and then looking for a nice spot to sit and read.  The park we walked to had no trees for shade, which is so unusual among all the tree lined streets in this town.  So we just walked to another plaza instead and sat there reading during the hot part of the day.

In the evening we had a free wine tasting at our hostel, which would have been rude to refuse.  After we went out for dinner at the very Argentine time of 22:00.  We walked to a Tapas restaurant I had been to 4 years before, and which I raved about.  When we had gone on Sunday it looked like it had closed for good such were the locks on the doors, but tonight it was open, and the food was every bit as good as I remembered.  The only problem with the food was we ordered too much, as we often do in Argentina.