Rosario is beautiful. It also has a much smaller, friendlier feel than Buenos Aires. I like it a lot.

We arrived in to Rosario after a four hour trip on South America's famous super comfy buses mid-afternoon/early evening and went straight to a recommended hostel - thankfully it's low season so there was plenty of space. Actually in our eight bed dorm, there is only us and one other English guy.

We spent the evening walking around the river front and checking out Rosario's main attraction - the flag monument. Rosario is the home of the guy who designed the current Argentine flag so, there are flags literally on every street and the monument is nothing short of epic. The whole area dedicated to the 'flag memorial' covered a great deal of space, included a huge tower, several imposing columns and an ever-burning fire. The tower gets lit up at night and is set against a gorgeous backdrop of the Parana River and several small islands. We were lucky enough to time the lowering of the flag at the monument. This received a lot of respect from those around and three army personnel also saluted the flag the entire time.

After a lazy start to our second day in Rosario we ventured out with Pete, English dorm mate, to explore the city a bit more on a gorgeous day! We went through the centre of town, which is clearly affluent with a number of fancy shops and has a strong European influence. There are a lot of colonial style buildings, which I love. Both in Buenos Aires and here, the heavy catholic influence is also clearly evident everywhere, a lot of churches and cathedrals which are beautiful and fascinating to explore.

We went back to the flag monument and this time, went inside and went up to the top of the tower where there is a lovely 360 view of the city and river. Both during the evening and day there were quite a few people around who didn't really seem to be tourists. It kind of seems like a place people go just to hang out.

Next stop on our self-guided walking tour was - Che Guevara's birthplace! After some slight navigating issues we found it, well we walked in to the sign. It is an old European style apartment block with a sign pointing to one saying 'The House Che Guevara was born at' ... and that is about it! Nice apartment though. There apparently is a lot more on Che in Cordoba.

We walked through some nice parks, which were quite busy for a work day we thought, to get to the Provincial History Museum of Dr. Julio Marc . There were some amazing artefacts from South American and Inca history in here. Unfortunately it was entirely in Spanish so we were unable to learn as much as we could have but, the paintings were stunning and we were able to look at old Inca relics, several maps of different eras from different explorers and, a pretty extensive arms display. A fascinating place for super cheap (2pesos, which is maybe about NZ$0.5).

We later convinced ourselves that it must be some sort of public holiday (6 July) as the date had been spelt out in flowers in the garden in front of the main lake in the park and, there seemed to be a lot of 'festival' things around - hot dog stands, street vendors, people cranking a tight rope, a dancing fountain display (to QUEEN ha) on the lake, some local kids playing football in the park (pretty handy actually!), I even saw my first Argentine protest complete with gunfire (pretty confident they were blanks!), drums and singing.

The three of us spent our final evening in Rosario watching the Copa de America Argentina vs Colombia football match at the closest thing to a pub we could find. Turns out, the concept of watching a sports game at the local isn't quite the same here as it is at home, we just couldn't find one really! Watching Argentina play football with Spanish commentary in Argentina - was still a pretty awesome experience!