March 16. Wine tasting.

What would Jack have done? He would have treated Sara and drink a good Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec with her, he would have lied his hand on her rounder parts and sing a hymn to the moon with her. He wouldn't that care Sara fell from the sky. He wouldn't have cared if she grew from the ground either.

In the Mendoza hostel I wrote a few pages. I couldn't really focus on what I had to say; perhaps I had nothing to say.

After a walk through the large well-kept city park we wanted to taste what Mendoza is famous for: wine. A bodega offered wine tastings for the tourist. The most expensive wine costs 340 pesos for one glass, that is about 100 dollars. For one glass of wine. The ladies smiled accordingly and served some tasty water as we were asked to wait for our turn. We looked at each other and the wine-menu that included a range of exotic upper class wines, and decided to sneak out the rustic patio. Wines of superior quality have every right to exist, just like the fruit flies that drown in it.

That night, we could have done the ultimate Argentinian thing: a cabalgata (horseback riding) during atardecer (sundown) to have an asado (barbecue) upon arrival. We could have trotted dully towards the bright peach sunset, singing gaucho cantos, laughing, make a huge campfire and warm the palms of our hands while the horse hoofs would scratch the barren ground, eat chunks of juicy quadril meat roasted on a slowly revolving pin with fat dripping into the fire that would have evaporated with a hissing sound. Unfortunately it was not available.

We tried to hitchhike to Cordoba instead, but at the access road to the main highway we didn't have much luck. So we took the bus instead for 100 pesos en effectivo. In Argentina, always ask for en effectivo because it's ten percent cheaper. It was a cama-bus but the service was way below the semi-cama we had experienced on our way to Bariloche, were the service readily surpassed aircraft standards. The night was no pleasure, but at least she brought us to yet another city.

That night I did not dream about delicious wines flowing from steep mountain slopes (again the slopes) into a lava pool where broadly smiling saleswomen bathed and measured the acidity with the greatest precision then chlorified it and bottled the wine in slender bottles that would start to talk so they had to put the cork on a special kind of phellem they had circumcised in order to close the bottles airtight.

March 15. Mendoza.

Pablo went out early for work, and we left with him. Still sleepy, we walked along the grand avenue of Santiago searching for a please to sit down and have a coffee. Although the city center was full of people, we could hardly find a bakery like the ones I am used to in Berlin where you can have a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I got a bit mad. What were all those people doing here, with all the shops closed? Cultural difference should be something funny, something that makes you go ah-ha and rub your curious chin. Here it only struck me like a fallacy, a freak of culture. Please do open the shops at times we are used to, and THEN you may serve the most exotic cultural differences, THEN we will be interested.

We took a bus to Mendoza at daytime. Ate something in the station. The bus ride turned out to be a good decision because we crossed the Andes on a very rough terrain near its highest peak - the Aconcagua is nearly 7000 meters high. They would just have to put a small pinnacle of human vanity on top of it to actually exceed seven kilometers. Uphill, towards the pass tens of large trucks crawled up the dusty roads, reaching 3800m at the Argentinean border control. We had to wait only for about half an hour and could enjoy the view. The old dilapidated railroad tracks that curved the grey mountain slopes formed a fascinating remembrance of earlier attempts to conquer the harsh Andean ridge.

Mendoza is a neat colonial town. The center is structured around a two block square with four orbital squares; the south-eastern one called Plaza Espana is the best. Check out the mosaic of colonial madness and the little tiles of Spanish weapons on the floor. Mendoza is very green like most Argentinean cities built in times when space was plenty. A salad in a fancy bar. We spent the night in creaking bunk beds - the blue hostelling international sign had called us in. Wine, papas fritas and a good night's sleep.

Another reason for writing is conquering fear. Perhaps that's also what Franz Kafka did. What is fear, anyway? The sensation we have when something scary happens, like in that funny shower-scene in the Hitchcock movie? The confrontation with an unexpected intimidating fact, or rather with the confrontation a fact that we are able foresee much more than we would like to be able to foresee that fact, or rather the gruesome shivering we feel in our spines when power is exerted upon us in a hostile manner, or rather when we look our certain death in its ugly grinning face when some of the fundamental Angst peeps through the stratum of our worldly ventures. Our life is a peep-show of death looking at itself. Fear, who are you? You are, like everything else, a way of exerting power, not its opposite. But such an odd way of exerting power, because it is not organized around the self. It is organized around the decomposition of the self. Those remarks are just for consideration, please do never take them for granted.