Hey thanks, all, for all the comments. This is kind of neat getting feedback either here or on my email as I go along. There are pics coming, I promise...I just haven´t got around to downloading the camera yet. The best buy ever had to be my 4G card - I have room for about 1000 pics. And thanks to Ceilidh, I have a power adapter for Argentina, so all is good.
Aconcagua. (Thanks for the spelling, Celia). A special note to Bernard...not a snake, but at 7,000 metres, the tallest mountain in the Americas, and the highest in the world outside of Asia. For $19.99, there is a DVD for sale with instructions on how to climb it. It´s about 120 kilometres outside of Mendoza, but I think this time I´ll keep to the Aconcagua Provincial Park in a nice flat spot.
Here goes with new stuff....
I checked into a 2 week Spanish immersion course at the Instituto Intercultural on Monday morning, after finding the home of my host family Sunday afternoon.
First, the program and the school - they really do provide everything promised, and then some. I am in class of 5 students, for 2, 2 hour classes starting at 8:30 am and ending at 1:00 with a 30 minute break. Lunch is brought in afterwards for anyone wanting to hang around, and then there are activities in the afternoon - we toured a winery and wine museum yesterday, there were salsa lessons today, and tomorrow will be a music session.
The instructors are excellent - one of mine also teaches English and Manarin Chinese, and has just come back from 5 years teaching English and Spanish in China. The students are interesting, from all over the world, in various stages of travel, adventure, and work. In my class, there is a Biology student from the UK who has been touring around Chile and Argentina for the last two months, a woman who has just moved to Mendoza to start a meditation / yoga type business, and a retired couple from Germany who have been in South America for a few weeks and finally decided to check into a language program out of frustration not being able to communicate in the way they would like. Most of the other students are from Australia and from throughout Europe.
The host family and house is very nice, with a large garden and pool. As promised, the host mom is a great cook. This is what she does for a living - takes in students through the institute, but has become well known and recommended through blogs and friends of friends, so she always has people around. There is another guy at the house - a med student from Denmark wrapping up his degree and polishing up his Spanish in private lessons at the Institute to work with Doctors without Borders down the road. The walk to the Institute is an easy 20 minutes each way, which becomes 40 in the morning once I stop for a little more coffee (and medialunas of course), and potentially hours in the afternoon and early evening, popping into pubs and internet cafes along the way for a cold one (Cerveza, negra, chiquita por favour...no grande!)or an email check.
So I usually leave the house about 8:00 in the morning, and return about 8:00 or 9:00 at night. Between 4:00 in the afternoon when I leave the Institute and the time I head home there is lots of time to explore the city.
I´m running late...gotta get home, so I´m wrapping this one a little prematurely, but here is some big news for this week: I am heading into the Andes on the weekend on a historic and photo tour of Anconcagua, some ancient Inca sites, the Chilean border, etc. About a 12 hour trip. On Sunday, I´ll be touring two wineries, which includes a rather nice lunch at one, including a flight of 5 kinds of wine. So in short, I don´t expect to be updating this til Monday. There will be lots more pics between now and then, though.
