Bienvenudo a Mendoza!

Hello! Greetings from Argentina! Yes this means that I made the big trip down south and that I´m doing fine! Last Thursday I took the plane from Amsterdam to Milano and Buenos Aires. My mother and sister came to the Airport to say goodbye. Although we had been waiting and talking relaxed for a while, it was hard to say goodbye in the end... But then finally, my plane went and the adventure started.
In B´Aires, I had a coffee with Veronica which sat next to me in the plain. She was picked up by her mother and aunt and didn´t see her for two years, so it was a happy meeting. Then, Veronica showed me the right bus to get to the Airport for the final flight to Mendoza. That was a great help, for an airport is a crowded and busy thing and my Spanish stops at "vamos a la playa". I heard from my Dutch travel agency NBBS that my luggage would be transported to the other Airport, which was about 45 km away from the airport where I arrived. But as I arrived at the other airport, I heard that my luggage was NOT taken there. So I first try to call Alitalia (my flying company - I found out that I was lucky to get all my flights as planned because they are striking), but they couldn´t help me. So I hired a taxi and drove in a suicide action (you´ll understand that if you see the B´Aires trafic and the way my driver was driving) back to the main Airport, got my bag and drove back again. Fortunately I made the check in on time, but I was quite stressed and very angry with the NBBS, who already had been sending my tickets to Freiburg instead of my Dutch address...

But I want to forget this bad experience and start to enjoy - Mendoza is in the central-west part of Argentina (a wine region, close to Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Andes). I got picked up by the parents of my friend Alejandro, because Ale was on holiday. I could use his appartment, was invited by his brother Guillermo on a student´s grill party the first evening, the second eve I was invited on another party (but I didn´t go - they wanted to go at 2 at night and I wanted to give my leg a bit of rest - unfortunately I couldn´t take my Kaiserstuhl that I used in Freiburg with me, so I have to take care of my leg a little bit more) and yesterday, I was invited to have a great lunch at his parent´s place. This hospitallity is great and everybody is trying to make me feel at home, that´s superb.
Yesterday night, Ale came back from his holiday, so now we´re the two of us in his apartment - it was very nice to see him again after summer 2005 in Davos.
Furtheron I did some walking through the city. There´s a nice and relaxed city center with parks, pubs, music, palm trees etc. and a very big park (almost half of the size of the city itselves). Mendoza is situated in a desert, but as in Freiburg, they built small canals with Andean water and therefore, a lot of trees can grow. It´s a very green city in the middle of desert and artificially watered vineyards.
Mendoza is not really rich, but not really poor as well. I found out that pour and "rich" are mixed. You see a lot of very old cars, dogs and life takes place on the streets a bit more. I like that, the city lives.

And this morning, I had to get up at 6.30 (damn it´s my holiday...) to be at the language course on time. I went by bus, driving by the "micro" also is an experience if you don´t speak any Spanish. At 8.30 the course started. We´re in a small group with an American girl (hey Libby I already met two girls from Seattle, did you send them?), a German girl and an English bloke. It´s a really relaxed and friendly course, but hard to start when you don´t know a word. It´s really learning the basics. But there´s a lot to laugh and practice. In the afternoon, there are practical activities - today we went into the city and a supermarket to practice common words like trafic light and orange...

I´m very happy to be here. In the plane, I sometimes thought why I was doing this, but now it feels great and it´s going to be better every day I think. I´m also really looking forward to start travelling. I´ve heard and read so much that I now want to see it.

OK that´s it for now! I´ll write my new experiences soon and send you a mail to confirm that there´s some news on the site!

Good bye and greetings to all of you!

Jeroen