Well, just arrived in Mendoza, last day in Salta was interesting, as we were sitting in from of the Catedral in Plaza 9 de Julio, just lazily drawing and writing, a ruckus broke out with some maybe drunken guy attempting to steal crates from a strawberry stand, we had not even gaged what was going on before cops showed up to pull him off, then 30 seconds later in paraded blue camo and shield wielding riot cops to quell the situation of the fruit stealer. It was awesome and the cops here are oh so efficient.
The we hopped on a bus to Mendoza, and as on all bus rides, there are always drug checkpoints outside every province, or wherever they decide to have them, and it has happened to us before, they wake you up, ask for your passport and look for suspicious looking packages. This time no different, except the cop who asked for our passports kept saying and pointing at Juli and saying she was strange( i think, juli thinks he said scrunched, but why would he say that?) and laughing hysterically and even getting his buddy to some up so he could shine the ol flashlight and point out the ¨strange¨gringas. (or gringa, bc apparently i wasnt as strange as her? must be the long legs and the blonde hair? ahah)
Anyways, so this time they did find something. The guy sitting behind us did have several suspicious looking packages, including his backpack, a large cardboard box, and a garbage bag with a large object in it. When the unloaded all the contents onto a table outside, they were all filled with foot long tightly packed baggies of coco leaves. And in the garbage bag was a toy pastel pink plastic toilet like for toilet training, with bags of coco leaves jammed in it as well. Hillarious.
So they unloaded and weighed it all, coming to about 14.75 kilograms of coco leaves, which is like 35ish lbs of the stuff. And after posing with all the items at different angles, and lots of paperwork, they let the culprit keep ( what im guessing is the legal amount) some of the coco leaves, at least his whole backpack full and maybe a small box as well, and then they let him BACK ON THE BUS! He didn´t even look the slightest big phased from the entire situation. He was just chillin and i guess he maybe had a permit for the amount he was allowed to keep bc he kept showing them some piece of paper. But no biggie, he was even kinda smirking throughout the whole thing.
Meanwhile our cop friend kept shining his flashlight up into the bus and waving his finger bc we were watching so intently, like ah ah ah, this is cool but you cant watch. We did anyway. And i even took pix hahahaha! no flash though. im not trying to get a warning or anything, like the coco smuggler did. haha.
Madness I say. So now we´re in Mendoza, gonna chill for the weekend here, maybe do some more vineyards or some biking round, definitely checking out more of the enormous park that is only a few blocks away. And probably going again to this bomb veggie restaurant we found last night which is like the argentinean Flowers. We ate delicious spinach enchiladas, creamy potatoe quiche, mixed bean and lentil salad, Veggie empanadas, eggplant milanesa, potatoe wedges, cauliflour and broc oli(obama) w-cheese sauce. And ate some flan for postre. Muy rico y deliciosa!
And monday off to WWOOF
love to all -liz
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