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Despite feeling as though I had the best night sleep of my life on the night bus, I arrived at Cordoba at 7am really tired... and Alex felt like she hadn´t slept at all. I proceeded to feel fairly unwell throughout our time in Cordoba, which I can only assume is extended recovery from whatever bug I had in Bolivia. As a consequence, this is likely to be a very boring blog update!
We took a taxi to our hostel, which was lucky as it didn´t even have a sign outside so we wouldn´t have had a clue where to go. It´s located in a really cool building above the shops on the main commerical street. As we arrived we met a french guy who had also jsut arrived but decided he didn´t like the city and was hoping to move on that same day. He said that he´d read in the book that Cordoba was the second city to visit in Argentina, but I tried to explain that actually it´s just Argentina´s second city... so the equivalent to Birmingham.
First job for Alex and I was to find the office to collect our transfered money - address 1620 Av Colon. We easily found Avenida Colon two blocks down from our hostel, but we met it at number 1... 16 blocks later we arrived, having stopped on the way for coffee, medialunas, and a rest. After getting the money and walking half od Cordoba we walked back to the hostel and enjoyed some downtime while listening to the choice tunes permeating from the fashion shops below. This downtime turned into a 4 hour siesta.
On waking up we went to a travel office to book a bus to Mendoza, and compared to when we first did it in Buenos Aires over 4 months ago, the improvement is startling! With two hours to kill until any hope of a restaurant opening we sat in ´Bar Relax´ and shared a beer and sandwich. For dinner we went to a restaurant called Bar san Luis, and what the LP termed `a local parilla in a central location´. We sat out on the little plaza and observed a woman with the biggest bottom we´d ever seen. On ordering 3/4 of a bottle of wine and fizzy water we ended up with a full bottle and at one point we were a bit concerned we might have to drink a red wine spritzer! The steak we ordered was fatty (and therefore delicious) and the chips tasted like home!
When we came back to the hostel we found that the frenchman had been replaced with Peter, from Switzerland. Alex and I were both in bed when he came in and started chatting... I was aware that I couldn´t be bothered to respond much and then realised I didn´t have to - I just shut my eyes and went to sleep.
Day 130 - Alex started her day off by stepping barefoot in someone elses poo in the outdoor bathroom. Brutal. We had breakfast (two pastries... criollas this time - kind of like a dense pastry-scone) sat on the balcony watching the workers standing outside their shops waiting for the owners to come and unlock them. Before heading out for the day we agreed with Peter that we would meet him in the evening to go out - he was checking out and changing hostels that day. The arrangement took 30 minutes to agree and as we were leaving I asked Alex if it was me, or was he a bit boring. She hadn´t noticed particularly.
We headed to the Mercado Norte and instead of finding the throngs of stalls like the rest of South America, and even Salta, we found a very modern and well-organised market. We sat and had a coffee in the middle for more people watching and an Argentine daytime TV programme that seemed to consist of a transvestite hairdresser who dressed fat housewives in pyjamas and paraded them up and down a catwalk in her ´salon´. From the coffee we went straight across the market to a seafood restaurant. The LP said that the market was good for cheap almuerzos, but instead we found quite a fancy eatery with loud disco beats and neon lighting. We were still the youngest there however.
With my headache returning I took another siesta in the afternoon and while doing so the weather turned and it poured down for the rest of the night. 8pm was fast appraoching, and despite the weather we knew we had to uphold our promise and go out and meet Peter. So we put our coats on and walked to the main square, where we waited under the tree for him to arrive. He had brought with him a chilled bottle of white wine he brought from Chile, a Swiss Army penknife to open it (of course) and 3 cups, so we found shelter in the arches of a building along the plaza and shared a bottle of wine. This is where the enjoyment ended. Alex and I were then subjected to a full evening of dull dull DULL monologues that provided no opportunity for interaction - in fact, everytime one of us tried to interact we were talked over! It was astonishing. From the plaza we took a taxi to a restaurant in Nueva Cordoba where the monologging continued. Lucky for me, Peter had brought an LP on Chile that he gave to us, so I busied myself reading that for the eternity it took for the food to arrive. And even then, monologues also provide minimal opportunity for eating, so we sat there in agony as he took a bite every 5 minutes, our plates long empty. Poor Alex did a valiant effort trying to stay interested, but even she lost her patience a little bit when he converted from boring to creepy, and suggested we stay with him in his hotel room since it has 3 beds. At the end of the main course he proposed dessert, and when we said no! to that he said how about coffee. We got outside, flagged a taxi, dropped him off at the plaza and kept on going until we were safely inside our hotel.
Day 131 - Another balcony breakfast before checking out at 10am... one of the guys in another bunk was still asleep on top of the covers in all his clothes, including his shoes! As with Thursday, our first job today was to get some more cash, although this time I was subjected to much more interrogation and they even took my fingerprints. The man behind the counter seemed to see it as an opportunity to use the translator app on his phone, despite the fact I could understand everything he was saying. He also gave me a daub of hand sterilizer on a piece of paper to remove the ink on my finger, which was thoughtful!
Lunch at Bar San Luis and once again I saw the woman with the massive bottom in the plaza. In the afternoon we escaped the heat in the hostel and played scrabble, which has been severely neglected since the boat on the amazon. I won (it´s now 4 all), and was proud of my performance - I have improved so much! At 5pm we headed to the centre in the hope of joining a well-praised tour of the University. We found all shops shut up, with only stalls on one street. Twice we had to change course as two parallel streets were blocked, and things were starting to get critical as we struggled to find anywhere to sell us a drink. Eventually we found one capitalist newsagents that had stayed open and even tried to upsell me to a large juice. When we finally reached the university we discovered there were no tours, so we had a sit down outside and watched a couple of pigeons competing for a piece of cereal bar.
We wandered beyond the university to find streets of really fancy shops and hairdressers (it would seem that everyone spends Saturday afternoons getting their hair done) and then happened upon some kind of techno-plaza event at Plaza Velez Sarsfield - perhaps gay or christian? We sat in a cafe on the sidewalk on the plaza for a beer and sandwich, watching the event commence. On the way back to the hotel we passed some pound shops selling Christmas decorations, and since we´d had a beer, emerged having bought Christmas lights and a very small Christmas tree! After grabbing our bags from the hostel we caught a taxi to the bus station. 30 seconds after getting in the taxi driver pulled over to go and buy a lotto ticket!
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