Two Hilarious Stories from Argentina

(1)  Sally and I went to a market.  The market had "natural olives (i.e. olives that had just been picked off a tree and weren't canned)."  Sally and I both love olives, and we thought that tasting fresh olives off the tree would be very cool.  So we went and asked the guy who was working there what the minimum number of olives we had to buy was (there were minimum amounts for the meat).  So, he told us there was no minimum and we could buy as many or as few as we wanted.  Somehow in conversation it came out that we were going to taste them and he started laughing hysterically and he said that you couldn't eat olives until they had been cut and soaked in salt for at least a month because they taste so horrible.  Then, just for his own amusement he gave us each an olive and said to try them.  Sal and I both bit in and didn't finish the bite.  Olives are not edible off the tree.  We all had a great laugh.  When Sally went back there a couple of days later to buy our lunch for a tour, he asked her if she wanted any olives!

(2)  We went on a biking wine tour.  They give us bikes and a map and say, "here are your reservations, have a nice day."  So off we went.  We couldn't find our first winery (bodega).  We were going back and forth between the blocks they were supposed to be in and going crazy.  Finally we just went to the second one.  The lady working at the second one looked at us like we were complete morons for not being able to find this bodega that was "right down the street."  We pulled out our map - turns out the winery was marked in the wrong place on the map.  Also, the bodega didn't have a sign - just a white building with three palm trees at the front.  Needless to say we never did find that bodega.  Welcome to Argentina.