From Milwaukee's Best to Malbec

This week Buenos Aires got to be too much for me. I couldn't stand the dirt cheap prices, the friendly people, the beautiful women, and the warm weather. I remembered that I could be sitting around in NY, overpaying for the honor of sitting in a crowded bar that's charging 5 dollars to check your coat. But still, the grass is always greener, so we set out to Mendoza, Argentina, to go check out if things could conceivably get better than Buenos Aires.
The bus ride had a couple of good points. The chairs reclined to a 120 degree angle (I didn't make that up, that was the number they gave us, we got in a lot of arguments about what exactly the angle was). They served us champagne, hot food, and played us a movie. It also had a couple of bad points. The hot food was absolutely horrible. They found a way to work ham and mayonnaise into every single thing on the plate. One of the platters was sliced roast beef topped with mayonnaise. Another was a cake, literally cake batter, sandwhiched over a piece of ham, with tomatoes on top. It was beyond disgusting. I was paid pesos to try certain things. I ate an egg filled with mayonnaise, but the person who dared me never payed up. Typical. But the food wasn't the worst part. If you don't like the food on a trip, don't eat it, it's not mandatory. It was mandatory however that during dinner they played 7 music videos from 80's movies on repeat. The playlist was some Phil Collins song (not one of the good ones), A Righteous Brothers song from the movie Ghost, that Carpenter's song about bird's suddenly appearing, and "Lady in Red". I wanted to kill myself before we even got around the rotation once, and when we weren't sleeping that's pretty much all they played.
But as promised the bus dropped us in Mendoza, where the real fun began. Mendoza is incredible. Just like the Napa Valley, nice dry heat, trees everywhere, mountains in the background, and vineyards everywhere. We hit the pool, and then immediately booked a wine tour. We were taken around a vineyard, shown how they crush the grapes, how they ferment it, and how they store it in casks. Only after you understood the process were you then allowed to sample the wine. We learned how to swirl the glasses, check for tears, analyze the color, and spit out a bunch of pretentious bullshit about what kind of nose and aftertone the wine had. At one point the woman literally told us that one of the wines we were tasting had the flavor of red fruit. Not one specific fruit, like strawberries, or a combination like raspberries and persimmon, but literally every red fruit that exists. I was dumbfounded, but I took her word for it. We were on the tour with these Irish girls who clearly had no intention of actually trying to learn about wine, and were just trying to get hammered (or locked in their lingo). They were cool, but I was unimpressed because they failed to get locked, while I obviously must have gotten locked because I bought a bottle of wine in the gift shop afterwards.
That night we headed out to a restaurant, and put all our new wine tasting expertise to the test. Then for my friend's birthday we put our red bull and vodka expertise to the test.
The next morning we got up and signed up for a river rafting trip down the Mendoza river. It's a fast river but the rapids are pretty unimpressive, at least from this seasoned whitewater expert's point of view. But it was nevertheless a great time. Easily the best part was that we didn't have to sign one piece of paper the entire time. In the US you would have had to sign 15 waivers, turned over credit cards and driver's licenses, and update your will. Here we just gave some guy in a van money and he drove us out to the river and put us on a boat.
We went out to dinner at one of the nicest restaurant's in the city. We talked about the merits of the wine, and the demerits of the fact that the waiter didn't bring us about half our order. The owner came over and to make up for it told us that even though there were people waiting, the table was ours for as long as we wanted it. Without food we weren't really sure what we were supposed to do with a table, so we ended up leaving. I know, I know, I'm kicking myself now for not taking more advantage of sitting at a table as long as I wanted.
Final note. The bus ride back had the exact same music videos. And even worse food. They served us champagne on the bus ride, and all anyone did was complain about the poor quality of it. It's amazing what one week in Mendoza can do. Seven weeks ago I'm sitting in a bar in Berkeley ordering PBR because it's the cheapest thing on the menu. I spend a weekend in Mendoza, and suddenly I'm upset because the wine I'm drinking doesn't have the subtle overtones and heady finish that I was expecting. At least it tasted of red fruit.