Cordoba and More

Hello again. I'm sure that everyone was starting to wonder if I was still ok, since I´ve taken so long to write in my blog again. Well I'm doing Great! Argentina is wonderful and I have lots to talk about. Last week I went to Cordoba. Cordoba is the second largest city in Argentina with 1.3-1.4 million people. It is also a popular tourist spot because it is located near the sierras which are a small mountain range. The city is beautiful! There are old Cathedrals that have beautiful architecture and exquisite paintings. Unfourtuanetly at this time I cannot put up pictures of all the things I saw in Cordoba. I will try and get these pictures up as soon as possible!

Back to Cordoba. I left for Cordoba on friday morning at 7:30 by bus. This is the preferred method of transportion for everything here. There are buses leaving from Rosario for many different places in the country throughout the day. Therefore it is relatively easy to find a bus to your destination. The trip to Cordoba is aproximately 400 Km which is right around 250 miles. The trip took much longer than it would have in the United States because with the bus we had to stop in almost every little town along the way to drop off and pick up passangers. The ride was long and honestly quite boring because the land between Rosario and Cordoba can be best described as flatter than Nebraska. I do not recall a single hill between the two cities. I arrived in Cordoba just shortly after 2 in the afternoon. After looking around a bit in the bus terminal I found a information booth where I was able to get a map of the city and locate the hotel.

While in Cordoba I stayed at the Hotel Interplaza. I booked the rooms ahead of time on the internet and the site I booked them from said that it was a five star hotel. It was a very nice hotel, the lobby was very plush and elegant. However, I feel like a five star hotel in the United States would be a little nicer than this hotel was. I am in no way complaining because the hotel was very nice, it was in a great location and I enjoyed it very much. I am simply making a comparison between it and what I think a five star hotel would be like in the United States. Now many of you are probably wondering, ¨geeze Nick where did you find the money to stay in a five star hotel?¨ Well I was able to stay at this hotel because it actually was not that expensive by US standards. For 3 nights one room cost 256 US Dollars. I shared my room with Devin so in the end the room only cost 125 dollars for 3 nights. This made the hotel very affordable, not to mention the hotel offered a continental breakfast every morning, leaving me with one less thing to worry about. As I said earlier the hotel was in a great location. It was only 8 blocks from the bus station, so I was able to walk to and from the bus station, and it was only a block from the main plaza in the city.

The main plaza was also the home of one of the biggest, and I think most beautiful, cathedrals in Cordoba. Saturday morning my group visited this plaza and the cathedral. After spending some time here the group split up for a little bit. Devin Linn, Jim Palmieri, and myself went to Alta Gracia while Gillian Howard and Anna Vollmer did some shopping in downtown Cordoba.

Jim, Devin and I went off looking for the secondary bus station which is home to the smaller more local buses. These buses are similar to the white buses back in Iowa that assist older people to get out of the house and go to walmart or where ever else they go. If some one knows the name of these buses back home please leave me a comment with their name as I cannot remember. So the three of us headed off to the secondary station consulting our map frequently. We finally found the station, but we weren´t sure if it was actually the station. There were buses outside the building and there were platforms for these buses. However, when we went into the building it was a meat market. There were several different butcher counters and lots of people buying and selling every kind of cut of meat imagineable. I saw cow tounges hanging from hooks, cow hearts, livers, kidneys, everything. So there we were wondering where we buy our bus tickets and all we see/smell is raw meat. After looking around a while and following multiple signs I discovered that the bus station was in the basement or underneath the meat market. Why I didnt think of this earlier I´m not really sure (sarcasm). This was probably the wierdest thing I experienced on my trip to Cordoba. I still am a little confused as to why the bus station was underneath a meat market, but oh well. So we got our tickets and headed to Alta Gracia.

Alta Gracia is a smaller town about 35 Km outside of Cordoba. It is home to an old Jesuit Mission. We visited this however, we were unable to see more than the sanctuary because the rest of the mission was not open to the public until 5 PM. So we went in search of lunch and found a nice little resturant. We then made our way to the Ernesto ¨Che¨ Guevara house and museum. If you have never heard of ¨Che¨ you have probably heard of one of his close friends Fidel Castro. Che was born in Rosario, Argentina but his family moved to Alta Gracia due to his cronic asthma. He was a revolutionary who traveld all around Latin America on a motorcycle. There is actually a movie based on this called the ¨Motorcycle diaries.¨ He meet Castro and joined the revolution in Cuba. However, after some time in Castro´s cabinet he began to disagree with things that Castro was doing and resigned from his postion. He is viewed by some people here as a good person and some people think poorly of him. So wether he was a good guy or a bad guy I can´t really say. I can say though that his life is very interesting, like I said he traveled around Latin America on a motorcycle, and fought in revolutions in many different countries. His famous saying is ¨¡Hasta la victoria...Siempre!¨ which means Until the victory always!

When we had finished touring the museum we made our way back to Cordoba. On the way back to Cordoba I figured out how much we had spent on our day trip to Alta Gracia. It ended up being under 40 pesos for the day. This is the equivalent of 10 US dollars! And this included our transportion to and from Alta Gracia, our lunch, and our admission into the museum. On the way back to Cordoba our bus broke down and so we had to wait on the side of the road for 10 minutes or so for another bus to pick us up. When we got back to Cordoba we had just enough time to go back to the hotel drob of some stuff and head to the city bus tour. The city bus tour took us around to see the important places in Cordoba. This was well worth the 30 pesos it cost to take the bus. We sat on the second story of this double decker bus, and the second story of the bus is completely open so we could see the sites very well. The tour guide on the bus gave the tour of the city in Spanish and in English which was nice because when I didnt exactly understand something in Spanish I heard it shortly after in English. The tour took about an hour and a half and took us past large cathedrals, modern buildings with unique architecture and through the main park in Cordoba.

Later that night we went out to eat as a whole group again. And went to bed around 2 AM. Sunday we all traveled to Villa Carlos Paz. This is another town not far from Cordoba. It is situated in a valley with mountains around it and it shares the valley with a lake. It was a very beautiful city, however since it was Sunday everything was dead. We at least got to take a chair lift to the top of one of the mountains close. From there we had a great view of the city. We also took what was called the aerotren. It was a train on the top of the mountain that was supposed to be alot of fun, but it was actually quite disapointing as the train only went 200 meters before it stoped let us off at a gift shop then came back ten minutes later to take us back to the chair lift. In all I dont think the train went more than 400 meters! From the top of the mountain though I did have a very good view of the city. We spent a little more time in Carlos Paz before we returned to Cordoba. Overall I was not all that impressed with this city but I bet this city would be much more fun during the week when things are not all closed down. We went out to another nice dinner Sunday night, and left monday morning for Rosario.

It was a very good trip, and was alot of fun! This week has been kind of wierd because I only had class on tuesday and wednesday. Almost everything has been closed the last two days for the holidays. So wednesday night I went out to celebrate my 21st birthday since I did very little on my actual birthday. I was extremly supprised though on my birthday. My host mom got home and said something real quick that I didnt really understand, she then said that she would be right back and told me not to go anywhere. In a little bit she returned with 2 of her sisters and her mom. They were all carrying gifts, I was absolutely blown away! I didn´t expect anything from them! And they were very nice gifts. My host mom got me a shirt from Kevingston which is a very nice brand name here. Her mom got me a shirt from Cardon, another very nice brand name. And her sisters both got me bottles of wine. I was overwhelmed, I couldn´t believe how generous they were.

On thursday Jim, Devin, and I went to the park and drank mate (Máh-tE), and yesterday I meet up with Devin and Anna to work on our project for Spanish. Tonight my host mom is having some of her family over for dinner to celebrate my birthday. She wanted me to invite some people too so Jim and Devin will be joining us for dinner. It should be a fun and interesting night!

Well I appologize for taking so long to give you all an update on Argentina! I hope to be able to post pictures of Cordoba soon. So until then Bye, and I hope that everyone has a very nice Easter!

-Nick