Dork Reports

So I ended up being in Mendoza, Argentina for New Year´s Eve with zero plans to do anything, with the back up plan to eat my cup-o-noodles and drink some fancy Malbec wine by myself in my room while desperately waiting to play Words With Friends with folk from back home. When it became apparent that I would much rather be a fatty and have a proper meal rather than ramen, I left my hostel in search of an open restaurant. That was an ordeal that led me wandering around Mendoza for an hour looking for absolutely anything that would feed me. The streets were completely empty except for some stragglers who were clearly in the same boat as me. Even though I´ve been walking around the city for the past few days, the lack of people and the closures of pretty much every store front got me a bit disoriented and I overshot Sarmiento Street by several blocks and ended up having to extend my search for food. It was tiring especially considering I spent five hours in the heat earlier in the day in search of food and wine.

I finally reached Sarmiento and was so relieved to find open restaurants – until I realized they were only serving fixed priced New Year´s Eve meals that entailed meat and then more meat. I asked what options there were for vegetarians, “You can have a salad. But it´ll still be 80 pesos.” There was no way I was going to spend $20 on a salad. At that point I would have walked the 15 minutes back to my hostal to make my cup-o-noodles.

A bit further down the street I saw what appeared to be an actual menu that could be ordered from, and stood there waiting to be seated, as I showed up to a packed patio with others also probably as hungry as me. Right when the waitress was stressing about the lack of tables, I felt a tap on my shoulder and saw this girl I had met at my hostel in Bariloche. She invited me to join her and her man, and I eagerly accepted as I was starved for both company and food, and was happy to at least spend part of New Year´s Eve with people.

Well, an hour and a half later, we were finally served our sub par food, and finished maybe five minutes before midnight. We were worried we´d get stuck at that shit restaurant, and once we finished yelling at them for upcharging us 20% for our meal (the waitress very unapologetically apologized for forgetting to mention this at any point during our 1.5 hour wait for our food and drinks), we headed to the Plaza Indepencia, Medoza´s main square, hoping to find some festivities of some sort. There were like five people there, including us:

Mendoza is completely dead on NYE, apparently, with most preferring to be indoors at private parties, or with their families. But, eventually some fireworks went off and we stood around with all the other foreigners that ventured out watching and listening to all the stray dogs panicking from the noise.

After standing around for a while we headed off in search of an open bar, but failed as apparently bars don´t open up until 2am when the actual partying starts. The desolate streets were kind of creepy so I chose to walk home rather than wait around until much later to walk back alone since no taxis were in sight. So, I took another picture of the empty streets, bid farewell to Anne Katrien and Mark (we finally learned each others names when walking towards the “festivities”), and headed back to my hostal to wish people a happy new year and more importantly, get back to scrabble.

My friends for the evening: