A Tale of Two Mendozas  

April 1, 2008—12:30 a.m Mendoza, Argentina/6:00p.m. Valparaiso, Chile/April 7--9:00p.m. Valparaiso/ April 8--10:34a.m. and 10:15 p.m. La Serena, Chile

1.

When I first arrived in Mendoza near the end of January, I discovered that I had booked into a very good hostel in a sketchy neighborhood. I liked the people who ran the hostel (Sabastian was helpful, energetic, and friendly), and I made good connections with some of the guests there, particularly Tanja (from Finland) and Amanda (from Brooklyn), bright and funny women with style and a no-bullshit attitude, who Sheila and I later met up with in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires for a deluxe steak dinner. The hostel really was a fine place, and I didn’t know Mendoza, so it was instrumental in forming my impressions of the city. This year at the end of January the rains asserted themselves daily. Mendoza is a city with trenches between the street and sidewalk, where water runs and keeps the usually arid atmosphere from becoming oppressive, but when flash rains descend, as they did every day for several days, those trenches can overflow, flooding the streets, as they did. My timing was good. I never got caught during the torrential rains that often started at approximately five p.m. (17:00 hrs). I did observe unlucky soaked hostelers, though, and I was confined inside the hostel when the rains arrived.

When I would head out in the morning, I liked the plainness of our street that led to a main avenue of humble restaurants and shops. A simple fruit stand was set up directly on the sidewalk a block up, between the hostel and the avenue, and I took great pleasure in purchasing a banana or two on my way down the road. At night, as a solitary traveler most of the time, I didn’t care for our neighborhood. It was dark and empty, and one night as I approached a corner, a big-shouldered man in a dress and a wig ran across the street to position himself in an exaggerated pose like a hooker in front of me. He must have been sitting in an upper window of one of the buildings, seen me coming, and dashed out the door and across the street to place himself in my path. I walked wide of his position there but felt entirely weird about the situation. He was actually a very big, strong-looking guy, and if he got the notion to suddenly pretend he was a tackle for the Greenbay Packers, he could have done me great harm. What can I say? I felt afraid of a big, burly man in a dress. And nobody else was out on the street to hear my screams, should I need to cry for help, so I had some peculiar feelings about Mendoza, based upon where I resided. The best thing you could say, from one perspective, is that I wasn’t in a tourist neighborhood. These were real folks. 

Well, I am a real folk, too, even though I fess up to being a tourist. In fact, everybody knows when you’re a tourist, and trying too hard to blend in often comes off as a pathetic attempt to be someone you aren’t. A tourist’s best shot at blending in is to be genuine, to look and listen, and to respectfully observe cultural customs without too much ado. Natural and honest is best. I mean, look at those pathetic losers who feel compelled to wear a woolen Peruvian hat in the middle of summer. Oh, yeah, I think they’re native. We are from elsewhere, and we look it and act it because some kind of super magic doesn’t exist to shapeshift us into one of the indigenous people we came to gawk at and interact with. If we behave in a natural way, with respect for local customs, one sincere movement will align with another, and some kind of common ground might form where we can stand with equal footing as one looks across to the other as another person who is a curious but honest creature. I think I buy that. I know I cannot change from who I am into someone I am not, and I don’t think anyone expects me to pretend I’m one of them. I’m absolutely not ready to hop into a dress and wig and get real on the corner in order to become part of the hostel neighborhood, as fun and crazy as that potentially could be. John Lithgow did a good job in the film version of The World According to Garp, no? Basta!

The hostel was run professionally but in a friendly way, and they provided connections to local excursions I was happy to learn of and participate in. I took an official wine tour, picked up in a van at the hostel and taken to two wineries and an olive oil facility for the reasonable fee of about forty pesos (about fourteen bucks). The next day Amanda, Tanja, and I took a city bus out to wine country and walked to three wineries, tasted wines, and had lunch at one of them, an experience preferable because of our complete autonomy and because we didn’t always know where we were, which made for a bit more adventure. From the very start, we didn’t actually know where we were headed, but we were relatively sure we’d smack into a winery. And once you smack into one winery, another one can’t be far away.

I must fess up that I had some expectations concerning Mendoza as wine country. I have spent a fair amount of time around the Napa/Sonoma region of California, as some of my favorite cousins live around there and the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, my good friend and cousin Mark Molofsky has built and remodeled several wineries in that vast region of vineyards. It is a beautiful area with towns scaled for people, towns regularly referred to as quaint, though in recent years many communities have become overrun with commuters or retirees or tourists. The expectations triggered when I was told that Mendoza was wine country, did not include a place that was so urban. And the actual wine territory outside the city was more rustic and less cohesive than that of the Napa/Sonoma area. Rustic was okay by me—I’m not always overwhelmed and awed by designer wineries of the wealthy—but the area was spread out and sometimes shabby. The city and wine region of Mendoza was something of a let down when I considered the city’s peculiar shadows and bustling streets, and the dispersion of wineries on the outskirts of town. I had a reasonably good time; I just never entirely warmed to Mendoza.

Another time, I signed up for a full day of travels to Punte del Incas and then to the end of the road up to Mt. Aconcogua, the highest mountain in South America, where Argentina and Chile have both planted their flags. It was one of those journeys fraught with hairpin turns overlooking death-defying drop-offs. My trips out of the city gave the city more substance, placed it regionally for me, and increased my appreciation for the province of Mendoza. And that lesson was one I appreciated as I entered one town or city after another in my travels.

So, that first Mendoza was mostly a satisfying experience for social interactions and for aspects of excursions that were spectacular in their own right, and they situated Mendoza regionally and personally. I also enjoyed the plazas and the peatonal (pedestrian street), aspects of Argentine cities I will sorely miss when I return to the United States.

If someone had asked me about the city of Mendoza, though, I couldn’t have recommended it wholeheartedly, given the perspective my neighborhood had offered.

One day while exploring another neighborhood where I was in search of an Arabic restaurant I’d read about, I walked a brighter friendlier barrio than the one I was staying in, and I saw that there were several hostels along that street, and I thought, “Maybe if I had stayed in this neighborhood I would have experienced a better Mendoza.” At the time, I had no expectation that I would return, but I did return on March 29th in order to settle in and write some before venturing forth to Valparaiso, Chile.

2.

By the end of March, I was traveling without clear ideas about succeeding destinations, nor would I usually nail down reservations for a bed in a hostel or a private room. I’d do some homework in a guidebook and/or on the Internet to access hostel or hotel locations and get hints, but I was flying by the seat of my pants, unsure where I would stay exactly or how long I’d remain there. What I did know this time was that I had no intention of staying in the dark backstreets of Mendoza. I saw myself in that well-lit neighborhood of restaurants, bars/clubs, and hostels—a street of casual shoppers during the day who would pull up at a sidewalk table for coffee, drinks, or a meal with friends.

I searched in my guidebook for the street, noted three hostels within a three-block stretch, and when I arrived at the bus terminal grabbed a cab to the one at the lowest end and worked my way up the street. The first hostel was full except for one bed in a large, stuffy room in a basement. The common spaces were attractive, but I couldn’t picture myself in that room with seven other people. The ventilation wasn’t good enough for my taste. I thanked the young woman who showed me the room and pressed on. The next hostel was completely booked, which meant I had no decision to make at all. The young man at the third hostel took the time to show me all of my options, and one of the dorms was well ventilated and had one single bed free among the bunk beds. That single bed with no other over head clinched it. I said that I’d take the single bed in the dorm for one night, and a private room the next night. The combination of types of rooms would save me some money, and the private room would give me the privacy I craved in order to write about my experience in Rosario and to continue developing a story that is revealing itself rather slowly.

Someone reading this, presuming anyone is reading this, and there isn’t any reason to presume anyone has so much time that he or she would waste it on my account, might wonder why I’m not naming names. Why doesn’t he say where he stayed? If I were reading this, I might ask the same question, but here’s my answer—to myself and to anyone who has decided to keep at this tale. I’m not writing a guidebook, and I’ve been at enough hostels and hotels to know that whatever a single, authoritative guidebook writer might report could easily change between the time impressions are recorded and printed, and the time any prospective traveler might read such impressions. In fact, though I was entirely satisfied with my stay at the hostel in Mendoza, while I was there a woman had a camera swiped, and another woman had a hundred pesos snitched from a wallet she left on her bed. My personal experience shouldn’t count as a recommendation, nor should the negative experiences of two people who left their valuables out for the picking count as an all-time black mark on the hostel. Both experiences are worthy of consideration, and either could sway a person rightly or wrongly. And I’m sure I will name names whenever I feel like it in other writings, so I’m not establishing a firm principle here. I can speak to the overall atmosphere of the neighborhood in making a second Mendoza come to shape for me, and for now I choose to steer clear of certain particulars.

And here is another consideration when thinking about my new impressions. My second time in Mendoza allowed me to relax into the city. I felt no obligation to go on excursions or to behave like a tourist. What did I really do in Mendoza? I recall getting a haircut for fifteen pesos, five U.S. dollars, and the barber offering to wash my hair for free, which was very relaxing. I paid him twenty pesos because I felt guilty that this man was paid so little for the service he’d provided me. He’d given a weary traveler a perfectly good wash-and-wear haircut, which is what I’d asked for in my limited Spanish, and he’d poured delightfully warm water on my head, which revived me from my midday slump. What else did I do? I holed up in a private room all day to complete a piece about Rosario—The Long Haul, The Writing on the Wall, and Sometimes a Bicycle is More than a Bicycle—and I added another day in that private room so I could continue developing my short fiction piece, working title End of the Line. Other than that, I went out to eat a steak one evening, a large salad the next, and an omelet and glass of white wine on my last night. Late one night I had a complimentary drink at the hostel restaurant with a group of folks I’d met around the pool table, and afterward, in order to soak up a martini and a Fernet Branca with Coke consumed at a nearby thumpa-thumpa-tsk-tsk disco my companions had selected, I ate my first, perhaps my last, superpancho. For months of travel throughout Argentina, I’d passed on the superpancho experience. A superpancho is a giant hot dog that Argentines smother in any of a vast variety of toppings. The choices of sauces, salsas, pickles, vegetables, and papas fritas (fried potatoes) are mind-boggling. The late-night joint I went to had to have over twenty choices of toppings. I think that I selected about five or six of them and then dove into the dog like a one-year-old devouring his first birthday cake. It was a delicious mess, or so it seemed at the time as it adorned my face.

Other than those mundane high points, I snapped pictures and walked tree-lined streets in neighborhoods between errands and stops for café cortado. I became so absorbed in ambling that I even forgot to go to the large park a few blocks up the street, the one touristy plan I’d concocted.

My second Mendoza reshaped the first one, and the combined impressions of the two Mendozas are probably more accurate than either one alone.

¤

My home is Seattle, Washington, and I know that each day offers its own experiences. Living somewhere for years gives my city depth and nuances that are impossible for a short-term tourist, and even the best travelers could fly away underwhelmed if they arrived when the city was in a slump, or they happened to miss the city’s little treasures, or they just didn’t have the eyes to see the many shades of grey and qualities of muted light that create monochromatic watercolors at every turn. Because I know that about my own city, I must understand that dynamic about Mendoza, a city that in my experience has been two cities simply because I’ve only been there twice.

                                                                                              Steven Jay Weinberg