The Last Week: Bronchitis

Sorry about not posting for a week but I've sadly had bronchitis and spent the entire time in bed. I still have a wicked cold, but I'm okay besides that. Let's start with Mendoza.

The trip to Mendoza on Friday was absolutely beautiful. It was a six hour bus ride through the top of the Andes Mountains. We climbed to 17,000 feet! That's higher than I have ever been before (not in a plane). The bus ride was on a very small road with 26 hairpin turns. At the top was the border into Argentina. Immigration took 2 hours of just sitting there. Once we arrived, we took our cab to our hostel that we had reserved. For only paying $8 a night, it was actually a pretty nice place. The original plan was to go out when we arrived, but I had a bad case of motion sickness after all those turns. We called a night.
Day 2: We were staying for 3 nights so the hotel gave us a free voucher for a bike tour of the wineries in Maipu. We left around 10 and arrived at the bike place, Mr. Hugos. They gave us a map of about 15 wineries, liquor producers, and beer brewers in about a 2 mile radius. 1 place was free and the rest were $5 a piece, which is not bad at all. The first place was a museum and winery were we tried our first glass of Merlot (famous Mendoza wine). Afterwards we went to a liquor place and tried jams, chocolates and home made liquors. We each had a shot of Absinthe, Tobacco liquor, and 2 other kinds. I only made it to 2 places before getting slightly drunk. Bike riding became a lot easier at this point, and I found I had a lot more unexplainable courage. We went to about 4 or 5 more places, but none stood out as much as the first 2. At around 4:30, we went to return our bikes. Mr. Hugo offered us more wine, and as polite guests, we couldn't resist. After drinking for 6 hours, we were quite drunk, but this glass put us a bit over. We were very sloppy. Getting home was quite an adventure on the bus. We stopped and grabbed fantastic pizza at a local restaurant. After replenishing our energy and we were ready to hit the bars. Apparently, the next day was their primary election day so everything closed at six and no alcohol could be sold until Monday. Major buzz kill, we called it a night and went back the hostel and slept off our inebriation.

For the rest of the trip, I will only be describing one location: my bed. I woke up with a terrible deathly hangover and didn't leave my bed until 2pm. I got up to eat lunch and went back to bed. Over the next 4 days, my hangover slowly evolved into bronchitis. Everyday consisted of me sleeping. That's it, pretty boring, but I can guarantee you that I was in hell. We were supposed to leave on Tuesday, however, due to excess snow in the mountains the border was closed. Wednesday morning- border closed. We decided we couldn't wait any longer and booked a flight home for that day. It was a long and complicated day that I have no desire to relive. The trip went from fantastic and frolicy to unfortunate and uninteresting. I finally made it home Wednesday night.

I am proud to announce that today I am finally almost feeling better. I made it around town today and met up with a few friends. I still have a serious cold, and also no voice, but I do have energy. I've yet to be able to eat a whole meal, but hopefully soon! Hopefully my blog will start to get a lot more interesting than this. Nos vemos!