!Hola, hablo Castellano un poco!

Hello everybody, just a short message from Mendoza. Everything is fine down here. It`s very hot; last saturday it was 42 degrees and dry. It is a warmth record for Mendoza. You already sweat wenn you just sit and don`t do anything, it's just my favorite temperature... But you get used to it.
Last week, the Spanish course had started. It actually is going great, I'm satisfied with my skills up to now: I can rent a bike in Spanish (sorry, Castellano, the Argentine version...), drive by bus, order and pay a drink or dinner, ask the way or something in a supermarket and do some smalltalk in the school, with Ale's friends etc. But it takes time. I found out that I get confused because of my (small) skills of French and because of learning a lot of words, verbs and tenses in 1,5 week. But I think, by repeating, talking and let it settle a bit, it will improve during travelling. On every case, we have nice teachers (Gabriela and Ana Maria) and a nice class, with Alan from Liverpool (who doesn't like Manchester United...), Sophia from Seattle, Silja from Berlin and since this monday also Esyllt from Wales. We have a lot of fun and learn Spanish in a relaxed way, by speaking a lot. We can eat lunch at the school and in the afternoon (when all the Argentina's heva siesta, which isn't for nothing with this heat) we have some activities (watching a movie, walk through the town or singing songs, all in Spanish), which help a lot to learn.
After those activities, I have been walking a lot. At one (very hot) day, I hiked up the first pre-Andean hill, la Cerro de la Gloria, which forms the viewpoint of Mendoza. It was a very long walk through the city and the enourmous Parque San Martin and a terrible climb in the sun, I got a heavy sunburn, but the view was great. And on my way up, I even saw a Carausius (don't know the English name, but translated out of Dutch, it's a "walking branch"), which I had never seen before in nature.
Yesterday I rented a bike, so now I can go by bike through the city. It's quit dangerous, a lot of people warned me for the trafic and for bandits on quiet places, but if you stay in the centre, it's ok and better than walking or by bus. The school is about four kilometres away from Alejandro's house, so it is worth to go by bike!
The people here are great and very friendly, they really make you feel at home. At friday, we had a barbeque at Ale's parents' place with the whole neighbourhood. Barbequeing and eating cow's meat is food number one in Argentina and it really was delicious, and very nice as well. One neighbour had her birthday and they organised a trumpet, so I could play happy birthday and some jazztunes. That was very nice.
During the weekend, Ale and I drove up into the Andes to hike and camp, into an area which is called Vallecitos. We drove a marvelous tour with Ale's fourwheel drive and ended up near a skiresort at about 2.500 meters. We hiked up to over 3.000m to camp. The good thing was, that the temperature only was about 20-25 degrees instead of the 42 in Mendoza. On our way up, we met a bull that didn't really like us, but we managed to get passed and climbed on. At a plane morene area, we wanted to camp near some other tents, but there were a lot of cows and bulls and as this one bull came up, they started to fight. They nearly run over a tent with a sleaping guy in it, imagine that are more then 200kg of barbeque on your sleeping bag... By throwing stones and shouting, we chased them away, but later on, we camped on a higher and safer place. The view was so nice at sunset and later with very much stars, the milky way was superb and of course the stars of the southern hemisphere (so no Dutch boyscout training would have helped my if we got lost...).
The next day, we hide the main gear, and climbed up the mountain San Bernardo (whose name perfectly fitted to me being a St. Bernard), which is about 4.300m. The view was more nice every step we did, we saw an Argentinean lama called guanacos and we might have seen a condor, but we weren't shure. After a lot of rocks (it remembered me of the holiday at Monte Rosa in 2002, but with a slower speed...), dust and climbing, we stopped at almost 4.000m, because it was already late and the way to the summit was a steep ridge we did not necesarily needed to go (if you know what I mean, because of heigth fever...). But the view was marvelous. We saw three summits of over 6.000m (one of them Plata, a mountain that is being climbed a lot as a training for Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Andes), great landscapes of former glaciers and to the east, we saw the plain country of Mendoza and the pre-cordillera, as the lower Andes are being called. We hiked down to our luggage again, loaded our backpacks and started to hike back to the car. But that was the heaviest past, because we were not used to the heavy backpack anymore, and we were already tired. But we made it, and then drove down to the holiday house of the parents of Ale's girlfriend Luci, where we were welcomed very friendly again, and had a nice meal. At least, at 23.30 we were back in the heath of Mendoza and I had to get up at 7 again for the language course. So it was a very great and exhausting weekend!
Then thanks to Ale's digicam, I can show you some pictures of our great weekend:



OK that's it for now. It's 21h here and I nead to cook, after a wine tour with the school this afternoon. You see that you get used to the local habits easily (good wine and eating late).

Goodbye! Jeroen