Life in Mendoza

Getting to Mendoza
Our plan from the start was to stay in Mendoza for an extended period in order to study Spanish.  Our immediate goals were to find an apartment, enroll in a Spanish school and find a hostel to stay in while we did our search.  When we arrived and found the hostel where we had reservations, we were pleasantly surprised.  In Buenos Aires, we stayed in a hostel that had okay rooms, but the rest of it just felt somewhat grimy and the bathrooms were smelly.  Here, in Mendoza, for the same price we had a nice room with a clean private bathroom.  The hostel was in a cute old house that had a beautiful garden courtyard area and a pool!  However, there is always a catch.

Fountains in Plaza Independencia

Fountain in Plaza Independencia

Mendoza is in a desert but you would not know it from walking around.  Every street is lined with large old trees each of which grows a next to, and receives water from, a 2-foot deep, irrigation ditch.  Water is released through these irrigation ditches once or twice a week in order to water the many thousands of these trees throughout the city.  When the water is shut off, and the water recedes, the ditches are left with water which becomes stagnant.  This must be where the mosquito breeding takes place.  At night, they would visit us in ridiculous numbers.  It was hot enough that we had to sleep with the windows open, but there were no screens, so the mosquitoes would enter in unrestricted clouds.  There finally came a night where we reached out limit.  At about 1 am we realized that there was no chance at sleep under the presiding conditions.   We sealed everything up and went on a mosquito-killing rampage. It was a team effort, we ran around the room armed with magazines using every method possible to kill them.  We learned they liked to hide in the folds of our backpacks so we would stand ready with our weapons before giving one of the packs a good kick and then do our best to be sure there were no survivors.  That night we slept very warm but we slept.  The next day we found another hostel, which, in many ways, was not as nice, but we had a private room with air conditioning and no mosquitoes.

Language School
We looked up the language school that Tamara’s friend Cody had recommended to us, and signed up for a week of “intensive” courses. This consisted of 4 hours of class a day, 5 days a week. The classes had about 4ish people in them, most classmates staying for a week before heading off to a new place. The classes were a bit unstructured, but they did give some good practice speaking.  After the first week, we decided that we liked the school.  We switched from every day classes to attending two afternoon classes per week.  This has allowed us to have more time to do other things throughout our days but still have some structured class time.

Apartment hunting

Our apartment

Apartment searching in another language can be amusing.  We decided that we did not want to spend much money but were willing to spend a little extra if we could find one with WiFi, an oven and air conditioning.
We were able to look at one apartment through a connection with the school. It was a nice enough place, but the location was not great and the living room had these two couches, which converted into the beds, and no oven. Then we met someone that worked at our hostel that had an apartment, which had everything we wanted and the price was right, but it felt a bit run down and dirty.
We started looking online and though the classifieds in the newspaper.  Using classifieds to find an apartment was a challenge for us.  We had to ask around to find out which of the eight or so newspapers we should use, translate the classified entries and call the numbers we found.  Talking on the phone is hard enough English, in Spanish its even worse.  We located a calling center and wrote out a rehearsed speech like “Hi, I’m interested in the apartment that is in Diario Uno [the big newspaper here].”  Tamara did the talking and after reciting her speech, the other person would say something rapidly in unintelligible Spanish and then hang up.  Dan would ask, “What did they say?” and Tamara would say, “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s available anymore.”  Either that or I was supposed to meet them somewhere.  I just didn't know.

Parque San Martin entrance gate

After a week of trial and error style apartment searching, we got an email back from a website called Mihouse.  A woman named Mercedes got back to us and through her, we were able to see two more apartments, and we really liked one of them, which we are now living in.

Lake in parque San Martin

It is very small but it is the only apartment we saw that had air conditioning, WiFi and an oven (which is essential for the baking enthusiast).  Other benefits include a nice BBQ in the backyard, which we are able to use and it is located only two miles from Parque San Martain.  This main city park, though a bit run down, is large and beautiful.  Some of its features include a lake with a row club where you can watch crew teams practice rowing back and forth along the lake.  There are also works of art throughout the park, which demonstrate a time in the past when the city was really prospering including beautiful statues and elaborate fountains.

Now what?





Since our only commitment is now Spanish class for a total of about 3 hours a week you might ask, “what do we do with the rest of your time?”  Here is a small list…

Spiral Staircase

• Living two blocks away from the park allows us easy access to miles of unpaved running trails, of which we have taken full advantage.  
• We spend a lot of time studying Spanish both at home on our own and we attend several evening, school-sponsored activities.  Some of these activities include weekly “intercambio” events where locals and foreigners alike get together to practice speaking.  These intercambios take place both at the school and at a bar where alcohol, we believe, makes it a bit easier to speak Spanish.  These activities are a great way to interact with locals so we are trying to make a point of going.  
• In addition to being a great place to study Spanish Mendoza is also the wine capital of Argentina so we are doing our best to study this topic in great detail.  We have participated in a harvest, attended wine tastings and do as much research at home as possible.

Tamara with Nagrita (she found her way back to us)