Wine Country, Mendoza

        Wine, wine, wine and then more wine.  After a 12-hour or so bus ride I arrived in wine country.  A highly developed/modern city lying at the base of the Andean mountain range.  Reminded me a little of Georgetown, just at how everything is pretty much off one main road, shops, bars, restaurants.  I wine toured and met some hilarious English kids.  They found a dirty old toy doll in Bolivia and ever since then they have been traveling around with it.  It was pretty hilarious they had turned it into a game.  They even sat him in seats at the table when we were eating.  They told me they also took it out at night and it got girls to approach them instead of the other way around because they wanted to know why these guys had a doll with them.  The wine tour was on bikes it got tiring pretty quickly as we were biking on dirt roads from vineyard to vineyard and some are more than 5 miles from each other.  My hostel was amazing I stayed at Itaka, very clean good crowd on the main boulevard and there all you can eat BBQ/unlimited vino for $10 was so good.  I couldn’t move when I was finished I had eaten so much.  I met up with Katie right when I got into town and she immediately introduced me to some really good wines.  We went to a BBQ at one of her friend’s places with about 12 other Americans who work on the vineyards there, and a few Argentines.  It was like a wine free for all, everyone worked at different vineyards so everyone brought wine from there’s and it was basically a battle at who’s was better.  I was happy I got to try all these amazing wines for free.  All they did was talk wine though which got annoying because they knowledge of wine they had far exceeded mine and I felt slow for not knowing all these terms they used.  It’s weird in Argentina people bring their kids out to the bar with them.  So it’s not unusual to see 3 year olds out at 2 am.  Mendoza will forever be remembered as it was the first time I ever got pepper sprayed.  Which was ridiculous, I think the guy just did not like Gringos.  I was trying to help the drunk Aussie from my hostel and then an argument ensued which turned into me getting pepper sprayed and being blinded for 30 minutes and losing my beanie.  Not to happy about that, it burned and there is nothing you can do about it.  It was fine the next morning, but I am still angry about it.