As I may have mentioned previously, the house I'm staying at is opposite a massive park, called Parque General San Martín. San Martín was an important figure in Latin American independence, who formed an army in Mendoza in 1814, which crossed the Andes and helped liberate Chile. Although I'd been in the park before, I hadn't really explored it properly, so yesterday I decided to venture deeper inside. In the morning I went into the centre of Mendoza to cat...

On Monday I started at a new hospital, Lagomaggiore. I spent this week on the labour ward, which was very busy - they average around 15 births a day. Being a public hospital, for people without insurance, the patients tended to be quite poor, with little education. I was surprised by how young they seemed to be, with a typical patient being around my age, giving birth to her third or fourth child. Compared to Notti, Lagomaggiore is bigger, but the building i...

Having somehow managed to spend 3 weeks in Mendoza and not visit a single winery, I finally rectified the situation today with a wine tasting trip in Luján de Cuyo. The tour consisted of 4 wineries, the first called Achavel Ferrer. It isn't a typical winery for the area - it has a special fermentation process, using special concrete vats rather than stainless steel ones. This allows them to ferment at higher temperatures for shorter periods of time, as th...

Just a quick update to mark my last day at Hospital Notti - I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by! It was quite a relaxed day as there isn't any surgery on Fridays, but I had coffee with one of the registrars and at lunchtime we had a little party with some pastries that I had taken in for everyone. After lunch I took a stroll through the local area along the main road down to the main bus station to take some photos. Every so often nailed to the...

This weekend we had a long weekend in honour of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the Americas, so I decided to take advantage of the extra day off and head to Chile. Friday I took the coach from Mendoza. We followed the same route to the border that I took on my trip to the mountains last weekend. It was colder this time and we had a little snow at the border, where I also found out that there were two British girls on the coach with me. One was from Lo...