For most of Feb. and ending in the first week of March, Mendoza has a huge wine harvest festival called Vendimia. The main event seems to be electing a queen from one of the 15 or so different departments in the province of Mendoza but there are concerts in the parks every weekend, parades, lots of other stuff, etc. All week there were life size cutouts of the queens outside the newspaper office with a computer where you could vote. You could vote online too.
The following are from the parade the day the queen was elected. This is a gaucho which translates as cowboy but really, a gaucho isn't anything like a cowboy. Here is one in the parade, note the outfit. They usually are on horseback and nearly always carry a huge knife. Not someone you would want to mess with.
This is one of the queen candidates (center). In the parade they are on floats with their retinue and they throw fruit to the crowd, usually grapes. They must have run out of grapes because this group was throwing melons. Seriously, the table next to us caught one. You have to pay attention or you could get hurt. One of officials apparently got beaned with an apple this year.
We had good ringside seats in an outdoor cafe. Next to Miriam is Elsie, the mother of Brian, a friend who lives in our apartment building who we met at the language school. His mother, sister and brother in law came to visit from New Zealand for Brian's birthday.
Another gaucho. There are several different styles, depending on what part of the country they come from.
That night we had tickets through the language school to go to the big event where they crown the queen. It was quite the spectacle, around 40,000 people they said. The school hired buses for about 30 of us to go.
Here we are in the stands. Brian is just above Miriam's head, Brian's mother and sister are next to him, a row of students from the school are behind them.
The show went on for two hours, not counting the hour of warm up bands that played beforehand. There were something like 700 performers in all. The theme was something about the grape harvest and the traditions of Mendoza. This was one of our favorite parts, two hands (with people inside to make them move) and a rolling pin making empanadas (a kind of meat pie which is real popular here).
Another interesting part was when some acrobats came out of some grapes suspended over the stage and did a kind of Circ de Solei act as they slowly descended. You can just barely see them hanging under the grapes.
It was a cast of hundreds with several costume changes, special lighting effects, video, acrobats, fireworks, multi level stage, water fountains, etc. Really impressive. And there were two other small stages off to the right and behind us with other dancers.
The show part of the event ended around midnight after which they did a dramatic reading of the votes for queen. Really. It took 45 min. and 5 announcers to read all the votes because they did it dramatically. We still don't know who gets to vote. Finally the woman from Guaymallen region was crowned queen. The announcers are standing on the left middle stage. The losing queens are in a clump just above the F in the YPF (corporate sponsor) sign and the new queen is just to the right in a clump of officials. Her picture can faintly be seen on a video screen in the center above all the lights, below and to the left of the grapes. The people on the lower stage are all the performers from the show. After they crowned the queen there was 35 min of really spectacular fireworks. Due to all the traffic we didn't get home till 3AM.
