Recently I took a weekend trip to the happy little city of Mendoza, Argentina. The main reason for the trip was related to passport issues. I was allowed to stay in Chile for 3 months, but then I had to leave the country, come back, and now I am good for another 3 months. Make sense? My friend, Sarah, and I bought bus tickets and left early on a Friday morning. As we were preparing to board the bus, the bus driver asked Sarah for her passport. He looked through it and saw that she had the needed paperwork. To our horror, I was missing it. I thought all that was needed was my passport and visa that was stapled in the back. No, no, no. There was some other document that I supposedly received when I arrived in Chile. Sarah speaks Spanish fluently so she talked to the driver about what to do. We wondered if I should run home and get it in my files. We wondered if we should just risk it and get on the bus. We wondered if we'd get rejected, and have to spend the day in a border patrol office waiting for the next bus to come along. Eventually the driver just said to get on, and "Oh, by the way, you might have trouble when you get to customs". "Perfect!", we thought. We were sweating the entire 4 hours to the Chile-Argentina border. We met two other girls from the States were in a similar predicament. They ended up getting rejected for a similar reason.
So, we arrive at the boarder and waited in line to get stamped. When it was my turn, I just smiled, pretended nothing was wrong, and calmly handed my passport to the lady at the booth. She said something that I didn't understand, and I think it was at that point that Sarah chimed in and said that I didn't have the paper she was asking for. Luckily, our bus driver happened to be right next to us and so the customs lady started yelling (more like scolding) at him for letting me on the bus in the first place. He just kind of laughed and said, "Yeah, I know." She went away to a room to talk to her supervisor. When she came back, she said I could enter. Feeewwwww! Thank goodness for exceptions and bus drivers who don't care about border patrol laws.
We arrived in Mendoza and found our way to our hotel and later just walked around the city. We got some recommendations for a good steak restaurant. Actually, every restaurant is a steak restaurant in Argentina because they are famous for it. Beef! It's definitely what's for dinner! We also went to a ferria (like a market), and bought some scarves, jewelry, and the cutest hat ever. I also found an ornament that I loved. Basically, over the weekend, we hit every ferria in town...some more than once.
Saturday morning we tried to go visit a place called Cerra de las Gloria. It was hill that looked over the entire city and has some sort of statue at the top--probably Gloria. Unfortunately, we'll never know because we walked for 2 hours and never found the place! We followed our map and started walking inside the park. We were going in the right direction, but we didn't realize how far it actually was. At one point Sarah recommended we hitchhike on the back of someone's truck. I thought she was joking but, no, she wasn't. They used to do that all the time on her mission so it was okay. Eventually we found the entrance to the zoo and asked the guard how to get to the base of the hill. He told us that there were two ways, but that it would be faster if we followed the hill to the left. "Great!", we thought. We started up the hill when suddenly a jogger starts running towards us and tells us not to go up that way because there are robbers waiting in the bushes for unsuspecting tourists. Thanks, a lot, zoo guard! I was a conspiracy theorist and thought that maybe the guard was radioing one of his buddies telling him there were gringas approaching. Anyway, we were very thankful for our guardian angel/jogger. Once we finally made it to the base of the hill we learned that it was another 40 minutes up. "Forget it", we said and took a taxi to a cafe where we ate more delicious food and rested form all of our troubles. Later that day we visited a tiny aquarium and did some more shopping. At night, you guessed it, more steak. We tried to hear some music at 10pm, but after walking to the club we learned it was a comedian instead. My guide book said it was live music. Arrggggg! I was sad. We went to drown our sorrows in dulce de leche. Again, another adventure trying to find this little dessert.
Sunday, we went to church at the Mendoza ward. It was quite comical because everyone kept thinking we were missionaries. We went to visit a famous Catholic cathedral but again, closed! At least we could peek through the keyhole. Finally we boarded the bus back to Santiago. Once again, we made a scene at customs. First, we were told to hurry up and get off the bus (we were the last ones off because I was still filling out a paper. Then we were kind of laughing a little too loudly with a guard and another one basically told us, "Less talking from you two." Then I was afraid my Mate was going to get confiscated and to top it off, the guy who stamped my passport wanted my phone number. Actually it was the old guy next to him that was asking for him. It was a pretty funny conversation. I laughed and told him that since I was from the USA, it would be very expensive to call me ;)
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