Cordoba

I had been reading about Cordoba over the last few years. It is one of the largest cities in Argentina and a large university city. Ernesto 'Che' Guevara studied in Cordoba, and so did many other important figures in the Argentine history. Even if I read about the city in books like "Chasing Che" and "Investment Biker", I had no idea of what to expect from the city. All I had read was about people there, and nothing about the city itself.

Youri and I arrived at the station slightly dissappointed after a 12 hour bus ride without any wine, champagne or decent breakfast. We got out of the bus, waited for the bags to be unloaded, and went to look for a taxi. When you put your bag into the bus, homeless people help you load it, you give them a coin or two, and they put a sticker on it, and give you the other end. When you get to the station you are going off at you have to show them the sticker, and you can get your bag. It feels safe enough, but I always tried to keep an eye on my bag on other stops than mine.

We met a woman from London who was going to the same hostel as us, and the three of us decided to take a taxi together. We tried for a while, but soon realized that no cabs would pick us up with all of our big bags, so we decided to walk. It was not far at all, so after a 20 minutes walk we headed up the staircase of an early 20th century building with stained glass windows. The hostel was called Baluch, and we learned later that it was owned by an Israelli. At least 30% of the guests were Israelli, and the rest were from London. Youri and I decided to explore some of the city, and went for a morning walk. There was a lot to see, but the city seemed pretty much dead.

Youri had been traveling a lot more around in Argentina than I had, and he had visited a lot of national parks. When he first arrived in Buenos Aires he met an Israelli guy who was leaving Argentina, but had a student pass that gave them entrance to national parks for one tenth of the normal price. The picture does not really look like Youri, and for sure not like the Israelli, who got the card from a French guy. But it has worked for them both. I do not have a student card, but in Asia I used my metro card from St. Petersburg. It had no picture, and the writing was in Russian. I said it was for Moscow Metropolitan University. That saved me a lot of money, but it does not work here. When we walked around we passed by Cordoba Catholic University, where Youri alegedly studies. It was funny, but the whole photo session was kind of ruined by horrible versons of R.E.M songs performed by a young woman on the next street corner.

When we got hungry we bought eggs, bell pepper, onions, tomatoes and some bread to make lunch in the kitchen at the hostel. It was good, and needed. We also got time to buy some souvenirs, and make an attempt of getting tickets to Alta Gracia, a town south of Cordoba. The wait was too long since we wanted to get enough time at a museum there before it closed, and we decided to do it the following day.

One of the things that Cordoba is most famous for is 'Fernet', a very bitter rum-like alcohol that they serve with coke here. I had come across this beverage other places in Argentina as well, but it was different having it at the roots of it's orgin.

When it was time for dinner we tried to find somewhere to eat on a backpacker's budget, but after walking around down town Cordoba for more than 45 minutes we could barely find anywhere to eat, despite of preference and budget. It was very strange. Streets were almost empty, and everything except for some ice cream stores was closed. We ended up finding a pizza restaurant, asked to get it in a box, and brought it to Plaza San Martin, where we Sat down on a bench to eat and watch people walk by. Not that many walked by, but the fountains, statues and buildings were nicely lit up, so at least we had something to look at.

Back at the Hostel I ran into some girls from Trondheim, and it turned out that we had common friends back home. The world is not big, proven again. It was really hard to talk my own dialect now, and I think I speak broader now, to compansate for my lack of practice. We watched a couple movies and headed to bed quite early that night.

The next morning I suffered through the plain white bread I would always have for breakfast, they always serve some kind of sugar with jam in it, and many hostels have fruit, but not this one. Then I finally got some photos uploaded to facebook, something I should have been doing for a long time, but it is not very easy with the computers in most hostels. Then we headed out to the minibus station to go to Alta Gracia. (Read about Alta Gracia in the next post)

Back from out trip to Alta Gracia we decided to buy bus tickets to Iguazu, since we were already at the station. After finding tickets we realized that we did not have enough money to buy them. They could only reserve them for one hour, so we did the stretch between the bus station and the hostel three times. Then we cooked pasta with a great tomato sauce, beef, and veggies. It was really good, and two American girls who burnt their vegetarian pizza were so jealous of our food that they pretended the burnt pumpkin pizza was eatable. After dinner we had a great conversation about meat, spiders and old people. We also noticed the map of Argentina hanging on the wall. The Falkland islands/Islas Malvinas were drawn as part of Argentina on the map, and apearantly it is on every map in Argentina, and I soon got the flashback to the Chinese maps with Taiwan as Chinese. Out in the streets there were signs in the parks and public squares in the shape of the islands saying "Don't forget, we will always remember."

The weather all of a sudden turned and massive lightning and rain kept us inside for a while, but later a crew of five English, three Norwegian, one Dutch and one Australian tourist, hit the empty town. It was evident that we needed to be our own party, and I think we did pretty good. Late that night I took a cab home with a couple of the Brits, and only got to hear the tales of the other group's adventures through town. One of the English guys almost got himself arrested twice, one time when he without asking took a female police officer's hat off her head and put it on his to pose for a photo. If it had not been for Youri who in his best Spanish begged the police not to kick the Brit's ass, there would have been blood in the gutter the next morning.

When we got in our 'Remis' (A remis is a taxi that you have to call for it to pick you up at a certain place at a certain time) we could not see any blood, and we got on the bus to Iguazu around 10 AM.