Day 7 - Mendoza, Argentina (Sunday 25 March 2012)

Day 7 - Mendoza, Argentina (Sunday 25 March 2012)

Got up today and ate our breakfast that is included with the hostel.  After breakfast we walked into town to find an information centre.   Town was completely dead!  It was full and lively the night before, but completely empty today.  Amazing to think that a city of a million people would be quiet in the city centre!  We later found out that Mendozians do not work on Sunday and it is dedicated to being a family day.  We booked ourselves into a city tour for that afternoon at the information centre.  While we waited, we walked around to the five main plaza’s to have a look.  Mendoza has over 500 plaza’s.  They were designed as evacuation points in the event of a major earthquake (Mendoza was completely flattened by a large earthquake in 1861).  As a result of that earthquake, this city is very modern, spacious and low rise.  The tallest building is 10 stories high.  Also, they have designed the city with very wide streets (so the rubble can fall into the streets).  Each street is lined with trees.  It is really beautiful.  I think this design would be really good for Christchurch.  In saying that the city does remind me of Christchurch with the grided road in the CBD and the garden city feel.

On our tour we went out to the Mendoza park.  It is the largest in Argentina at 420 hectors.  Here we visited the lake that is in the middle which is the source of the water for all the tree lined streets (each street has canals which feed the trees with water, since they only get 250-300 mm of rain here annually).  We also went up a hill to see the monument of San Martin who was the liberator of Argentina (he stopped war with Chile).  After this we went out to the rural parts of Argentina and we went to the largest church that Mendoza has.  There was originally a little chapel that people would go to, however, it soon became too small for the audiences that would arrive on Sundays.  Therefore, they built another church next door.  The new church can fit 4,000 people.  It is huge!  It however, doesn’t have a church feel.  It has exposed ceiling, and an auditorium seating arrangement.  It is i think i bit too industrialised.  

After the tour we went out for dinner again!  We are loving the food here.  We went to a different restaurant tonight that also does set menus (a set menu is much cheaper than ordering off the menu).  For 35 pesos (NZ 11) we got two empanadas each, a main of steak, fries and a fried egg and a drink of red wine. It was great to have steak with red wine for dinner as I have been looking forward to this alot! We finished dinner at about 10pm, however this is early for Argentina! The restaurant scene around town was still pumping!!! And when we were walking around looking for a good restaurant (about 730pm), we saw cafes were full of people having coffees!  We were talking to an English fella on the city tour and he said he left the restaurant after his dinner the night before at 1am and the restaurant was still serving food to customers!