Hello BA

Today Owen and I went on a big mission to get to the zoo in Mendoza, which doesnt appear to exist but we got to walk for a long time through this massive park in the eastern part of town. Was a neat park palm trees, camping, kind of reminded me of the endowment lands by UBC as it has a university located within it and big wide streets lined with trees and a walking path. Yesterday was fun, Owen and I checked out a wine tour starting at 2pm, which took us to an olive oil factory, two wineries and an artisan chocolate/ liqueur factory. To be honest, we both found the olive and chocolate factory to be much more exciting than the wineries, maybe because we got to test a bunch of different things rather than only two kinds of wines that were promptly sale pitched to you to purchase after you had tested them. One of the wineries was cool because it very old, the grandchild of the initial owner still ran the winery so it was neat to see how an old boutique winery operated. The major wine in Mendoza is Malbec, originally from France, but whose grapes grows best in Mendoza and is pretty much the only place in the world where Malbec grapes are grown. So you want to try some real Argentinian wine, try some Malbec.

Wine is also ridiculously cheap here, you can find it for $2-3 CA. Leather is another cheap item, I almost bought a pair of handmade leather boots the other day from this guy who dressed like Mad Max (they had old re-cycled tires for soles!) but alas they only had ones with ugly designs on it in my size. As I mentioned in a previous post, yesterday and the day before were national holidays here so everything was closed. Today, even though the holiday is over, everything is still closed! Pretty annoying but both Owen and I hope to do some shopping before we leave Buenos Aires. I think we also going to try to make it to Montevideo in Uruguay because supposedly there is a really great market where the ferry lets you off.

Tonight we leave for Buenos Aires on a 14 hr bus, the last one! Thank god. We were going to ball out and get the fancy bed seats but it was way to expensive so again we get the ghetto seats, oh well, last one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyways going to go enjoy the last of our few hours in beautiful Mendoza (probably the nicest and cleanest city we´ve been to so far), talk soon.

Jess

Ps. swelling is gone, finally!!