Cordoba

Dan: First of all I want to apologize for the long time between entries. I’ll try to make up for it by writing an entry so long and boring that you’ll wish I would’ve taken another day off. I do have plenty of excuses though; we were out of town, then consequently tired, I’m having a very busy work week and have a nasty head cold, our stolen internet doesn’t seem to be working, and we’ve had some traveler-friends staying over.

Remember a few months ago, you were in the dead of February and had to read about how we were enjoying sun, BBQs, the beach? I just talked to family yesterday while they were having a backyard BBQ and we were waiting for our landlord’s brother to bring us a space heater to help us combat the single digit (celcius) evenings. We got the propane heater, and it worked pretty well but tonight it isn’t working at all. Maybe we’re out of gas already. We’re both too scared to disconnect the canister and check. Ok, after writing that last sentence I was a little embarrassed about being scared of a gas tank so I disconnected it and shook it around and it appears to still have gas. Time to bug the landlord’s brother again.

The past weekend we went on a nice li’l bus trip (9-10 hours) to the city of Cordoba. The long-distance buses are pretty comfy. On the way to to Cordoba, we paid extra for the semi-bed option on the overnight bus. I think we may have gotten an hour or two of sleep, but we got a meal of caneloni and sandwiches and got to see a Nicholas Cage movie. We stayed in what turned out to be a fairly rowdy, youngster hostel. It being a holiday weekend the place was pretty full. Fortunately the private rooms were across the street from the main building where the Pop Dj band was playing, starting at 1:30 AM. In general not a bad hostel experience I’d say.

The city of Cordoba is a real city. Makes Mendoza feel like St. Cloud. Big buildings, crowded streets, narrow sidewalks. Now we appreciate the wide sidewalks and clean streets of Mendoza. Of course one category in which Cordoba certainly takes the prize over Mendoza is architecture. Here the buildings are mostly utilitarian and all fairly new. Any colonial structures were earthquaked away long ago. Cordoba apparently had no such problem, and it was the colonial capital before B.A. came to prominence. So there are some cool old buildings, most noticeably the churches. One must-see in Cordoba are the Jesuit ruins. We didn’t see them. But we did get to experience something else very important: a Chinese Buffet! I know you think that there are Chinese restaurants in every strip mall nowadays, and none of them is too exciting. But we hadn’t seen a Chinese restaurant in three months. We once asked someone if there was any Chinese food in Mendoza. He turned around and asked his friend, “Hey, where did you have sushi?” So anyway, we didn’t really do too much in Cordoba. We shopped but didn’t buy, looked inside some churches but didn’t pray, tried to book some tours but did our own thing. But it was certainly nice to be in a new place.

The main reason we didn’t spend much time in Cordoba city was that our main aim was to get out in Cordoba Province. We wanted to get out to a national park a couple hours away but found out that it was difficult to do so without a car, unless we got up really early, took a bus, then walked 2 hours to get to the park entrance. And we didn’t find that out until halfway through our weekend. But we did end up taking some other trips to smaller touristy areas in the province. On Friday, national holiday, Dia de la Patria, we went to uber-tourist mecca Villa Carlos Paz. It turned out to be a town of hotels wrapped around a giant dam-made lake. It was a perfect sunny day, maybe the last one we’ll have for a few months. We walked by a lot of closed trinket shops. Picture Wisconsin Dells in September. Still a few sweets shops open. No go carts or mini-golf. We went to the biggest hill and paid a few bucks to ride the chairlift (a chairlift with no ski hill?) to the top, and then ride the “aerotrain” around the top of the hill. The view from above was impressive. We could see a good piece of the lake and the town and were able to spy a potential place by the river to sit and drink beer in the sun. Which we did.

Food: “Hay Locro” (We gots us some locro in here) read the signs pretty much everywhere we went this weekend. Locro is one of the traditional foods for this holiday weekend. After seeing so many signs, I was positively excited about the prospect of getting my locro on, not even knowing what locro was. In Villa Carlos Paz we stopped at one of the many places that had the locro sign. Locro, at least at this place, turned out to to be a kind of soup, with beans, corn, a very oniony flavor, and the less appealing portions of pork, chicken and beef. The soupy/gravy part was pretty good, as were the scarce bits of what I consider to be meat. The, shall we say, fatty other parts(?), though efficient in their use of animal, were to me a little unappetizing. I’m not loco for locro.