Our first skiing experience: Los Penitentes

We can't catch a break. Upon getting home Friday night, our Brazilian English-speaking roommate was sleeping so we had to be really quiet to get ready to wake up in 5 hours. It was hard to sleep with the music at the hostel, and no one really slept through the night.

My pomelo addiction has been proven by the fact that I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and craved one so much that I put on shoes and searched to buy a pomelo (grapefruit) soda. Water just couldn't do it. After walking back in the room, Stacey & Elizabeth woke up and we passed the pomelo around the room to get hydrated. You can imagine how much our roommates liked us.

Just a few hours later, we got up at 5:45 a.m. to get on the bus to go skiing in the Penitentes mountains, about three hours away and a branch of the Andes. After finally catching a taxi, we got to the ski shop that had bagged up and saved our equipment to find no one there. Was this a scam? A bus arrived with a checklist of names, and thankfully we realized everything would be okay because we were on the list: Esteisi for 4 (How porteños spell Stacey). The Coach bus with semi-camas waited for us to get everything, took some sort of mental attendance and took off. We napped for the first two hours, and woke up to this!

The mountains outside of Mendoza on the way to the Penitentes

We stopped at a rest stop for cafe con leche and medialunas (typical), when the bus/attendance taker man came up to us with some sad news. He informed us (in Spanish, not to clarify, but usually everything is in Spanish..) that the route to anywhere with snow was closed and we were going to wait for awhile, then turn around and receive a refund because they couldn't take us skiing...or to snow. Apparently, this is common in the winter and something we didn't really consider, but we were determined. We sat with our breakfast coming up with an alternative plan, but praying that the route would open. After a little less than an hour of waiting at the rest stop, the bus decided to proceed and the man told us we were going to go to somewhere with snow but not the Penitentes. We settled.

We approached this route and lost all hope. Probably 100 buses and cars waited behind this border, and we realized there was no way we'd get to ski. It looked so intense like we were crossing into Chile, since we were less than an hour from there. All of a sudden, our bus just drove past the barrier, all of the people waiting and continued on the route with no one there. Did he actually just do that? Was this a safety hazard? Were we going to get to ski? Yes, yes, yes. This is Argentina; you can't plan that far ahead. The bus driver had to have known someone at the route opening, there was no way we could just pass everyone. But we were going to ski! Woot!

Controlling the closed route

After another 70 km of driving, we saw this:

We had finally arrived at our destination!

Showing some Argentina pride

We proceeded to pay our entrance fee after some credit card complications with Stacey (Welshful thinking that if you waited in line, they would let you pay in cash when your card malfunctioned), get changed, lock our bags up and put our skis on. Both mine and Elizabeth's boots wouldn't lock into our skis, but finally worked.

Getting ready

Aren't my roommates precious?

Elizabeth is the only one of us who has gone skiing....ever. There weren't really lessons or classes except for young people (in Spanish), so we figured we'd just go for it. I asked a lot of the people if they had any consejos/advice for us: half laughed, and the other half had no idea since it was their first time skiing too. We started off pretty rough by going on the medium-sized hill with Elizabeth, and all fell down.

Then, Jordin, Stacey and I headed to a smaller hill and SUCCESSFULLY went down without falling by the end of the day!! I still can't say I conquered the lift, because instead of putting the thing in between my legs I held it with my arms and gained some arm strength.

me, Stace and Jordin

After our couple of hours in the Penitentes, it was time to head back to Mendoza. Somehow in the huge cluster of people, the company knows who everyone is and doesn't leave without them, which still impresses me about Argentina since that would be hard in the USA.

The mountains on the way out

After dinner, watching Argentina unfortunately lose to Uruguay in the Copa América and heading back to the hostel, all of us sat in our beds ready to fall asleep. We could actually get ready since no strangers were in the room (hostel behavior), but there was one person's stuff still on a bed although the registration screen I peaked at at the front desk didn't show us having a roommate. We thought it might have been the Brazilian from the night before since we saw him in the lobby, but apparently he moved rooms (what does that say about living with us?!).

Right as we got up to turn the light off, a bald man looking about 29 years old walked in the room and none of us understood the words that came out of his mouth. That's right...he was speaking Portuguese. No English, no Spanish...a brasilero who only speaks portugés. Great.

Part of us was frazzled, but the other part was dying of laughter. Was this really happening?!? He was in Mendoza for "turismo," and could understand Spanish but only communicate in Portuguese. We could somewhat understand it, but the Portuguese accent makes it difficult to understand words that might even be the same in Spanish. We would speak to him in Spanish, he would respond, and we would translate what he said into English. He said all the English he knows is from TV subtitles (haha) and then, he ended up leaving. We don't know where he went, but he never came back...not even to sleep. The four blonde Americans remain intimidating. We were excited to eliminate some of our post-skiing sore muscles at the hot springs the following day!