Córdoba (March 21st - 23rd)

Saturday, March 21st 2015

Amazingly we slept pretty well on the semi-cama bus! We woke up when the sun was rising and we were about an hour away. We were surprised to see when we looked out that the landscape was much more green than the Mendoza area. We had expected more desert, but I guess since we are further inland away from the Andes, we are no longer in the rain shadow. And it rained overnight bringing a cool and comfortable day today. 

Our bus was double decker Andesmar (company name) bus, which tend to be nice buses. And it definitely was, as it is the only semi-cama bus we've ever gotten sleep in! (Cama = bed) The last few minutes coming into town, the driver was blasting through the streets and scraping the top of the bus pretty good with all the low hanging tree branches. He didn't seem to be concerned or make any effort to slow down, and it sounded pretty bad! Then all of a sudden the glass emergency exit roof hatch shattered directly above us and all the debris came raining down! It mostly got Jeff, since he was seated on the aisle. We are luckily lucky neither of us was seriously injured, just one scrape on Jeff's arm. It was pretty crazy, scared the crap out of us! I guess that bus will be out of service for awhile. Or at least I hope it will be!

We are staying at Baluch Backpacker Hostel. It was about a 15 minute walk to get here from the terminal. And we are right in the center of town. During the day our street is a pedestrian only street and at night the cars are allowed back in. Several blocks surrounding the center are like this, and it makes the area feel like a mall, because the streets are lined with shops and vendors. There are also corridors running through the city blocks so that each blocks has the outside stores that face the street, but also some indoor ones, making each block into its own mall. There are so many shops and people that it's hard to move through the streets! And there is constant shouting as people advertise what they are selling, such as light bulbs or umbrellas. I can't imagine yelling umbrella (paraguas) all day long. That guy must dream of umbrellas!

<hideous platform shoes are really popular here, and shoes stores seem to occupy at least a quarter of all the retail space!>

<this shows the less busy area of the street that we could see from our hostel>

The hostel it self is in a cool old building. I'm not sure how old it is, maybe late 1800s or early 1900s. It has an open air concept like many of the traditional buildings in the warmer cities do. It also has large dorm rooms with high ceiling and balconies. It takes up 4 floors, the top floor is a rooftop deck overlooking the city and the lowest floor has two private apartments that can be rented out for little more than the dorms cost. We almost went for the apartment but after a few minutes in there we decided we couldn't take the constant noise from the street below of the man trying to sell umbrellas! So we are in dorms again, (3 floors up from the street) which we have come to feel quite comfortable in!

We took it easy today, spending a lot of the day in the hostel. We ventured out for awhile around lunch time to go to a vegetarian buffet (pay by weight) restaurant. The restaurant is called Verde Siempre (Always Green) and is another one I found on Happy Cow. It's not 100% vegan, it's vegetarian, but there were many nice options for me. We only had to walk 3 blocks to get there, but it was peak shopping hour and it was quite overwhelming to sift through all the people and vendors to get there! It felt like a war zone and you had to run though as quickly as possible to avoid injury! The restaurant was a safe haven on the second floor above the street! We piled our plates high with corn pie, oven potatoes, roasted veggies, stir fry and salad. It was fantastic food! All of these veggie buffet places seem to be really good, and I will miss them when we go home! Just about every town we have been to so far has had a restaurant like this.

After lunch we went to the market to look for fruits and vegetables. The market was very similar to the one in Mendoza. Lots of vendors selling all kinds of strange things from stalls under one large airplane hanger like roof. You could buy a whole pig or goat in this place. They were quite gross to look out! You could also buy bulk foods and spices, produce baked goods, fast food and there were a number of restaurants as well. We got 2 corns, one red onion, a peach, a pear, an apple, a really cool quadruple kiwi, an avocado, two bananas and two grapefruits for about $5. 

<$5 worth of produce. It was all worth it for the mutant kiwi!>

After the market we hurried back to the hostel wanting badly to be out of crowds. By this time (about 2) most of the stores were closing up. They all have garage/storage style door that roll down from the ceiling completely blocking the view into the store. It gives the streets an eerie deserted feel with endless views of sheet metal. But just when we thought it would become a ghost town more vendors appeared out of nowhere and laid down blankets in the streets and displayed their wares! This place is crazy!

<view from our hostel once all the shops closed and the blankets came out.>

For dinner we had brown rice salad with corn, avocado, tomatoes and purple onion. Tomorrow we will have nice fruit salad instead of the hostel breakfast. We figure we probably won't be doing a whole lot more hiking since we will mostly be in cities now, so we better start eating better!

After dinner we took a walk along the river. It was a kind of depressing area. The river no longer has a natural bank, it's all concrete, and polluted with lots of trash. And the concrete was broken up and crumbling. Even so, it was interesting and we walked for about an hour on a nicely maintained bicycle path.

Sunday, March 22nd 2015

Today was a boring day with nothing much of interest to report. We had leftover brown rice mixed with fruit and hostel corn flakes for breakfast, then sat around the hostel for awhile. We went out in hopes of finding a restaurant that would be open and have vegetarian food. We were unsuccessful. Just about everything has been closed all because it is Sunday. However there were about a 20 bakeries open! And we succumbed to temptation and shared the largest alfajor we have ever seen!

<for some reason it looks small in the photo, but it was as big as a hamburger!>

<empty streets on Sunday>

After that we walked to the bus station to try to order vegetarian food for our bus ride to Salta. We were able to buy the bus tickets in our hostel, but they weren't able to select meal choices. Salta is our farthest North destination. We plan the rent a car and explore the surrounding mountains and canyons.

At the bus station we were told there was no vegetarian option, which was disappointing because we'd chosen to go on the more expensive cama bus, but with a different bus company, Chevallier! No good! Next time we'll stick with Andesmar.

For some reason there is a grocery store in the bus terminal, which the full selection, including butcher shop! So we bought a bunch of junk food and sat on the steps outside and ate our "lunch," honey roasted peanuts, whole wheat rolls and lays french fries potato sticks.

<I don't know why Lay's doesn't sell these french fry sticks in the US, they are good! They are extremely popular here on top of hotdogs with mayo and ketchup, they call it s super pancho!>

The rest of the day was spent back at the hostel. We had lentil, polenta and veggie stew for dinner. We were lucky to find a produce stand open earlier in the day to get the veggies, because even the grocery store is closed! We already had the lentils and polenta luckily. After dinner we repacked our bags for our departure tomorrow.

Monday, March 23rd 2015

It turns out today is a holiday, and tomorrow is too! So nothing was open again! Apparently the president recently created a bunch of extra holidays to make sure that there is at least one 3 day weekend per month and to promote in country tourism at the same time. I don't really understand the in country tourism part, because tourists tend to want to shop and eat. How are they supposed to do those things when everything is closed!?

We ate polenta and fruit today mixed with hostel corn flakes. We then sat around the hostel until 10:30 check out time and stored our bags. Our bus didn't leave until 8:15pm, so we had a bunch of time to kill. We walked around town looking at the various parks and historic buildings. We also walked to a number of restaurants, none of which were open. In some of the more touristy areas, we found a few open restaurants, but they all seemed to be boring sandwich shops. So we ended up eating a bunch of junk again today. We bought some candied peanuts from a street vendor, along with some waffle cone roll ups stuffed with dulce de leche. A little while later we had a terrible apple from another street vendor. We walked for several more hours and found nothing to eat and gave in and went back into a bakery where we had alfajores, macaroons and wheat rolls.

<In Plaza San Martin looking toward San Martin Street at the Cathedral and the statue of San Martin!>

<Iglesias Cabildo built in 1577>

<Jesuit block dates back to the 1700s>

<more empty streets on the made up holiday>

<food of desperation! Rolled up waffle cones filled with dulce de leche>

<there was anti Monsanto graffiti all over the city>

<acacia lined canal street, very pretty>

<palace of justice>

<Cool neo-gothic church from 1934, they left one steeple off during construction to symbolize human imperfection>

<inside the church>

Yesterday during our walk we discovered a cinema. I always remember going to the movies when I lived in Panamá an what a great escape it was! You could get out of your own world for a few hours, away from all the Spanish speaking, and forget you weren't at home! So we decided that would be a good way to spend the afternoon today. There are 8 screens in the theater. And it is housed in a neat old building that must take up most of a city block. There was one movie in English with Spanish subtitles, the rest are dubbed over in Spanish. So we chose the one English movie "Directo al Corazón." That translates to: Direct to the Heart. I don't know if that's the name in the US or not. We are completely disconnected from current movies down here. It was a pretty good movie and got us out of Argentina for awhile! They also sold beer! So we had beer and kettle corn! In total it cost about $17 for the tickets and food. A good value compared to the US. I can't believe how expensive it has gotten to go to the movies back home!

<a panorama of the movie theater, couldn't get it all in one shot. There are snippets of car moving in the bottom of the photo>

After the movie we retuned to our hostel to have a quick dinner and collect our stored bags. In our endless wandering today we managed to find a little grocery store that was open! So we had corn on the cob and a coleslaw salad with canned garbanzo beans mixed in. 

After a 30 minute walk with all of our stuff we made it to the bus station. Another day behind us. We are happy to be leaving. We unfortunately arrived here at the wrong time! I guess we are just lucky we didn't stay in Mendoza another day, or else we would have arrived to Córdoba and spent the Monday and Tuesday holidays here! We are also lucky that the temperature was cool and comfortable during our stay, never going over about 65. We heard it was sweltering hot last week, as is the norm.

Now we have a 12 hour ride on the cama bus ahead of us.