Wining the Nights and Climbing the Days

A winner!!! We have received our first letter ever at our new apartment. The winner of a very special prize is our good friends Harry and Nancy from Austin, TX. Just so everyone knows, it seems that the postcard took about 8 days to get here. Thank you so much!

So, what have we been doing? Interesting question, I know. What do we do with all this time on our hands? It seems that we have so much time, and yet no time at all.

Between the walking around, the jogging, the organizing, the cooking, the wine education and climbing, we've just barely got enough time to socialize and make new friends. It's a tough life, I know.

Tuesday we went out to El Salto again to do some climbing. It was nice to have a little more knowledge of the area. Now we know where to get off, where the wall is, the general layout, etc.

We even managed to plan out a little better lunch for ourselves. The day before, we (Erin, really) cooked up some delicious empanadas to take with us, so we weren't trying to mess around with sandwichs which really become an open-face festival of crumbs.

After a couple of hours of climbing at the wall, a car pulled up with a Swiss, a Brazilian, and two Mendocinos. We were immediately embarassed, well, not not so much embarassed as outclassed and outsized. These guys were massive. It was like we had tickets to the gun show,

but these guys had VIP tickets. Their warmup climbs were tougher than our "I don't know if I can do this" climbs. But hey, that's all part of the fun. They were extremely nice, and even gave us some pointers on how to do our route better. We ended up leaving a few hours later, extremely exhausted and ready to head back to town.

Yesterday, we went to the winemaker's night, hosted at Vines of Mendoza. This has become a favorite event of ours, where a owner or winemaker of a specific winery come in to present their wines. In this case, it was Caelum, a very young winery that open in October 2009. We had the opportunity to taste 5 wines, of which only 2 are currently available. The winemaker was there, an Italian who spoke spanish with a thick accent and little english. But getting the chance to talk with someone who was trying to make traditional european wines in Argentina was fascinating. Erin and I really dork out, taking notes, and asking questions that are pretty asinine, but fun.

From there, we actually decided not to go climbing today, as was planned, but to head to a new wine bar in town, specializing in boutique wines. The wine that we had was a Gradum Carmenere, bottle number 499 of 1000. It was a wonderful way to close out the night, talking with the owners about their plan for the store and just relaxing in the cool Mendoza night.

Tomorrow we're planning on going climbing again, trying to build up some strength in our weak arms. A friend from Peru is coming in tomorrow, so it'll be another fun few days ahead of us. We're also getting prepared for a visitor from the states. It'll be great to spend some time with Chris, just relaxing at a coffee shop or a restaurant and chewing the fat, spilling out words, not knowing more than a billy-goat what we'd been saying.

I think that pretty well sums it all up!