4 del Marzo - Vendimia
Mendoza is wonderful. We can´t decide which we like more...Buenos Aires or Mendoza. This would be a great place to live for awhile. In Mendoza you have a fairly large city with activity and culture, and just outside of the city you have mountains, lakes, rivers, vineyards and natural beauty. It doesn´t hurt that we are here at the best possible time of the year, the weather is great and we can enjoy all the harvest festival activities this week.We learned that Vendimia, the name for the festival, means Vintage. There are two parades through the main city streets on Friday night and Saturday morning, and we attended both of them. The parades were a wonderful cultural experience. Young and old, all the people from the Mendocino area gather in the streets to watch the procession. Everyone in the crowd talks about which queen in the most linda or the most simpatica. The floats carry the queens from each province and as they throw fruit (mostly grapes, but sometimes even cantalope size melons), candy, packages of mate, raffle cards, printed photos of themselves (like baseball cards), newspapers, and other goodies into the crowd of spectators. Little girls sit on the shoulders of their mothers and watch the queens float by in their glory. Teenage boys get on eachother`s shoulders to get a better look at the queens. Everyone is yelling, ¨Aca! (Here!)¨ in order to get the attention of the queen so that she may throw them some loot. Some of the kids have cleverly constructed a receptacle that looks like a net, by using a small bin attached to the end of a long stick in order to better collect the treasures that the queens throw into the street.
These floats are amazing. They are colorful and creative. Some of them have live musicians and dancers on them, some of them are painted beautifully like bunches of grapes, some of them are illuminated. The most unusual float we have seen had a parillada (a mobile barbeque) on it, with ten different kinds of meat grilling over the heat of a huge flame. In the procession in between the floats there are cabelleros (cowboys) riding their horses waving Argentine flags with women in long dresses sitting on the back of the horses, and dancers in costume moving to the beat of marching drummers (some of the drummers are elderly ladies). This has been a fantastic and memorable way to spend our last two days in Mendoza. We can only imagine what Carnival in Rio is like compared to this event.
Next we are headed to Viña Del Mar, Valparaiso, and Santiago (in Chile), which are just over the Andes from here (only a six hour bus ride). Apparently, we have a beautiful journey to look forward to tomorrow. On our way to Chile we will pass through the Aconcagua Mountains, which are 7,000 meters tall, and are known in their own right as a tourist attraction. We are excited to see more of Chile, but we are sad to be leaving Argentina. After two months here we have become quite comfortable and have started to feel at home in this beautiful country.
posted by The Blaus @ 3:06 PM
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