Sonrisa Para Argentina: Cafayate!!!

So this past weekend I went to Cafayate, Salta. Cafayate is nicknamed "where the sun lives", which I found out 1st hand thanks to the sunburn I was sporting. We left on Friday afternoon around 6, we being the 10ish exchange students and 5 volunteers.

Cafayate is famous for its wine, and beautiful mountains. Our reason for going, was 1. a wine festival and 2. to see all the freaking mountains. I have to say, I took over 232 pictures on this trip, and about 60% of those pictures were of just the mountains. They were really cool. For one thing they changed color throughout the day, in the morning they were gray, midday they were brown, in the afternoon they were green, and at twilight they were a dirty red. Needless to say the following picture occurred more then once.

The wine festival was really fun! It was an all day affair, starting out with a competition where the visitors had to go through the vineyard and collect as many grapes as possible. It is probably the cheapest, best, and most fun was to harvest grapes without having to pay the cost of labor. And I quote Paolo the Italian "I ah feel a like a mexicana... No imma not racist"

(The Mexican himself, Paolo)

(Dream team USA... like being blonde didn't make us stand out enough, we had to wear our matching blue AFS shirts. Twins?)

The festival also had live music (folklore), traditional Argentine dancing, asado, cupcakes, and of course empanadas.

(Action shot)

(This one is for block 4 English, because I know you're all hungry right now)

After the wine festival we went to this famous empanada restaurant where everyone writes on the walls.

(Yes that is my hand writing, why should it not be? I put it there.)

On Sunday we went to this awesome wine museum that, like I keep telling everyone "fue muy interesante porque habia muchas actividades interactivas". Por ejemplo they had little men the size of shoes walking around inside TVs, recordings of vineyards during the year with talking field workers, and hilarious English translations that when read dramatically make them sound hilariously poetic, and when read with an Australian accent, sounds like something Steve Irwin would say (may he rest in peace).

(This one is my favorite, read out loud as seriously and passionately as possible)

(They had movies about wine wheels, it was pretty legit)

(Also moving water movies that moved really fast and made me feel uncomfortable, like standing really high up in a building on a glass, see through floor)

There was also this really cool building across from the museum and it had llamas and stuff it was pretty chill.

The Americans, Lydia and I, then took a moment to teach our fellow exchange students the art of bernie-ing.

After the museum we went to an actually wine factory. It smelt really bad but it was interesting to see how the wine was made. I was terrified I was going to fall into the grape crushy machine, or drop the wine IIIII bought, yes IIIII bought wine, into the scary grape machine. There was grape juice remanants everywhere that looked like blood. I thought I was going to die.

Then we went and got ice cream. They had wine flavors so of course I had to try it. It tasted like wine, but colder and more frozen, but other then that it was completely the same as wine. I also got dulce de leche, and white chocolate. I really wanted normal chocolate, but then the guy asked me if I wanted white or dark, and I thought he was talking about the wine flavors, so I asked for white, and then I got white chocolate and it was a very confusing situation.

(By the way, the huge cup I'm holding only cost me 16 pesos, that's less then $4! Ice cream savings!!)

(I'm thinking of moving to Austria to become a milkmaid. I figure this way I can learn German, milk cows, churn butter, and eat homemade ice cream!)

Now before I finish this post, I will leave you with some pictures of mountains, because God only knows how many of those I have.