Hola! Argentina is better than ever, I'm really starting to love it here Last weekend, I went to Cordoba with a group of students, which is a little bigger than Rosario and the second largest city in Argentina. It is 5 hours west of Rosario, and let me tell you, the country between the two is like driving through Nebraska. Once we got there, however, it was a lot of fun, and it was good to get out of Rosario for awhile.
We arrived by bus around 10:00 PM, just in time for dinner. We checked into our hotel, which was really nice, and found a cafe. With the help of a local, we found a nice little diner that provided pretty good food for a very reasonable price. After eating, we returned to the hotel and drank some mate. We stayed up until 2:30 just talking.
The next morning, the boys decided to take a bus to Alta Gracia, which is a town outside of Cordoba and nestled along the sierras. Getting a bus ticket involved an interesting adventure. The tourism center told us where to get the bus station was. We walked to the address and saw the buses in the platforms. We entered the building and found a meat market. It was very, very odd. There were no booths to buy tickets or anything, just cow tongues hanging in display windows. Well it turns out that the boleteria (the ticket booth) was actually in the basement of a meat market -- very odd indeed!
Once we finally got our tickets to go (which cost only 7 pesos) we hopped the next bus and got to Alta Gracia without incident. First we went to check out the Jesuit Mission there, but it was closed until 5:00 PM. That was kind of weird, considering it is a tourist attraction, haha. So we did some shopping in a Gaucho shop, and JP found a mate to buy.
After grabbing a pizza, we went to the Che Museum, which is actually the house where he grew up in. It was pretty cool, but I'm not that into Che. I'm not going to go into the whole story, so if you don't know who he is you can look him up on Wikipedia. From there, we returned to Cordoba.
We went out to eat at a really nice cafe on the rooftop of a building. The restaurant was located across from a local market where there were tons of booths of artisan goods. I bought a leather bracelet, and got some really good ideas for souvenirs. But anyways, the cafe was really, really good. I had some bacon-wrapped loins, a stuffed pepper, and some very good wine (Thanks to JP). It was absolutely delicious. We walked back to the hotel, and on our way through San Martin Plaza, we found a group of people who were ballroom dancing. It was very cool, and it kind of made me want to take some dance lessons.
Our last day, we went to Villa Carlos Paz, which I'm sure is a very cool place, but I didn't have the best of times there. Carlos Paz is kind of like Alta Gracia in that it is nestled along the foothills. We took a chairlift to the top of one of the sierras, and it was pretty cool. We also rode on an aerotren that wasn't so cool, haha. The views were awesome, but we had to leave as soon as we got up there because they were closing. So we rode down and found something to eat. I had chicken suprema, which is normally delicious, but mine was raw. I should have just went to Pancho Villa (hot dog stand). Dinner was much better. We went to Betos for some good quality steak. Mine was delicious and the wine was to die for.
I have now been to Cordoba, Buenos Aires, and Rosario, and I must say that they all have very different vibes. Buenos Aires is like the NYC of Argentina. It's a huge city, and it feels like it. It's an international city. Rosario is much smaller, and the people here live differently. It has more of a "midwest" feel. The people are down to earth and genuine (at least this is what I have experienced), and life isn't so fast. Cordoba was sort of a mix between these two. It is much older than Rosario, the cathedrals were awesome. The people of Cordoba are even more laid back than the people of Rosario. I really, really liked Cordoba, but Rosario is my home away from home.
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