Wading Through Maipu

On the 6th of March, 2009, we arrived in Mendoza at ten o'clock in the morning, it was warm, but with a 40 per cent chance of showers in the afternoon. When we got to our hostel, which we would have been more than pleased with but ten days previously, we realised just how spoilt we had been when staying at the America del Sur. The hostel was in a prime position just off the main square, where, as luck would have it, Mendoza's biggest festival of the entire year was about to begin. We had lucked out again.

I took the time to fill out the registration cards with our fake professions, and then we went up to bed for a quick snooze. That afternoon we had a nose around town, looking at the hordes of people rushing to set up the huge stage in the square, and the stalls setting up for the evening. It was incredibly hot, and so our walking was interrupted twice by a call to the ice cream shop. We also witnessed our first Argentinean car crash, be it minor. A man went straight into the back of another bloke’s car - next to a police car. Unlucky.

The next day we went downstairs and a bloke that I hadn't seen before came up and asked if I was Chris, I presumed, rightly, that he worked for the hostel.

'Are you Chris?' he said, in heavily accented but perfect English.
'Yep, that's me.'
'Are you a writer?'

How did he know that I wanted to be a writer - maybe I put that as my profession - I had no idea.

'You write erotic stuff?'

Ah, now I remembered. I'd said that I was an 'author of erotic textbooks'.

'Oh. Yeah! Well, no, it was a joke. Meant to be, anyway.'
'You fucking tosser.' He said, completely straight faced.
'What?' I said, a bit shocked.
'Never mind, come on you prick, the rugby's on in a minute. You're not fucking Welsh are you?'

I sat down and realised that this was not some random lad insulting me, but the co-manager of the entire hostel, Tino. How refreshing! This was the start of a four day friendship that included him constantly wet-willying Helen, me teaching him even more synonyms for vagina than he already knew (which was a hell of a lot - he liked burst sofa for some reason) and him teaching me some more Spanish. Especially swear words. Unfortunately Wales beat Argentina in the 7's that day and he wasn't in a great mood. But that almost made it more fun, actually.

The next day we met a girl at the hostel from Aberdeen, Rowan, who was a doctor. Another useful cunt. That afternoon we bought a couple of bottles of red wine and went and sat in the square watching the preparations for the big celebration that night. General people watching and chitchat aside, our time was spent looking at this man, who was dancing around like a crazy man, and somehow made it up onto the main stage.






There was an indigenous people's pan pipe band playing covers of songs on that were actually getting a reasonable amount of attention before he showed up. I bet they hated him.

We were then forced - in the nicest possible manner by a policeman on a bicycle to leave the park if we wanted to keep drinking the wine. That we did, we went back to the hostel and continued to eat and drink until early evening. That night we met a few Canadians and Yanks and it was all going swimmingly until three fuckers snuck in behind a girl coming into the hostel. One of them came over and distracted us by talking at a billion miles an hour asking about rooms, and as I was trying to tell him that I didn't know about this sort of thing, and that he would have to ask Tino who was round the corner, the others nicked Rowans hand bag that had money, wallet and camera in it. Gutting.

Rowan, we thought, took this incredibly well. It was actually Tino that got the most annoyed and upset about it, forming a small band to go out and look for the thieves and then coming back empty handed and incredibly apologetic. He said he was sad because this is how Rowan would remember Mendoza, and he was very proud of his city. So to cheer ourselves up we watched the Eddie Izzard sketch about the Death Star canteen, imaginatively brought to life via stop motion Lego animation. It worked.

The next day, Helen and I went on a wine tour to Maipu. This was the funniest thing I have ever done.

The tour went to three different places, and we got to try a fair bit of nice wine. Only a few things a worthy of note from that day, namely the fact that I did not, in the slightest, get tired of asking questions about Maipu. 'How many vineyards are in Maipu? Are the best grapes always found in Maipu? I'm surprised that there are so many olives in my poo...' etc

The other thing was that there was an absolute dick head on our tour. He was from Israel and he constantly said that the best, wine, grapes, olives and anything else we saw came from, surprisingly, from Israel. The man who was giving the tour said that for real quality olives the trees need to be over a hundred years old. We asked the Israeli lad if his olive trees were over a hundred years old, to which he replied 'Of course.' Then they're not yours, we all thought.




Later on in the tour we were sat around a table tasting different wines of varying quality and price, when the same lad picked up the huge bucket glass used if you want to spit the wine out and said (admittedly quite funnily) to the two quietest, nicest Irish people we have ever met, 'So this is the glass for the Irish'. The next wine we were told was the cheapest wine that the vineyard sold, Helen said 'And this is the wine for the Israelis.' Fanfuckingtastic.



That day we pushed the boat out and bought two nice bottles from Maipu, which we held on to tightly on the bus on the way back, especially after one man had put a case of 12 bottles on the rack above his head that came tumbling down, just narrowly missing decapitating him, and every single one smashing. Oh well, that's the way shit goes down in Maipu.