Argentina's second biggest city is home to seven universities. Besides being young, vibrant, fun, it is an important intellectual and cultural hub. I personally also wanted to visit Cordoba to see the hometown of Alberto Granado, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's buddy and travel companion on his adventure through South America, chronicled in the book and movie 'Motorcycle Diaries'. I strongly urge anybody who hasn't watched this movie to do so..immediately!We reached Cordoba after a 24 hour bus ride from Puerto Iguazu. We were given the best seats on the top deck of a luxurious double decker bus - the front ones, with a gorgeous panoramic view. We were served hot vegetarian meals as requested, sparkling wine, red wine, coffee, snacks, and a generous dose of hilariously bad Hollywood films dubbed/subtitled in Spanish (2012, Twilight, or Back-Up Plan in Spanish anyone?). That's how I learned my first few swear words in Spanish. We were really spoiled!Arriving in Cordoba, we were immediately struck by how many "panaderias" (bakeries) there were in town, and the fact that everybody drinks mate. Shopkeepers at work, passengers waiting for a bus, friends taking a walk, students doing homework, an old lady on a sidewalk. Mate was ubiquitous. Naturally, we couldn't wait to try some ourselves. Our first experience with mate was "mate cocido", which is essentially mate in a tea bag, which tastes sort of like green tea. Naturally, I was under-whelmed. But the whole point of mate is in the preparation of the pot, the leaves, and the communal sipping from a cup and straw. We didn't get to experience this until much later when our travels in the deep South of Patagonia got us to befriend a native Cordoban. Lonely Planet had told us that when an Argentinian offers you mate, you never refuse. It's an honor, and an invitation to be their friend. The mate culture runs deep in Cordobans, and families will sit around in the evenings to chat, passing around a mate cup. And students in college will study together, passing around a mate cup.
Cordoba was our first brush with the phenomenon of siesta. We arrived around 11 AM at the bus station, spent an hour planning our next leg of the journey (which bus to take out of town etc.), walked the half hour to the hostel we had selected from Lonely Planet, checked in, showered, washed our clothes (we were running out!), and finally set off to have lunch. To our dismay, everything in town was closed shut. Starving, and bereft of much Spanish, we pointed our way across town and finally reached a strange restaurant run by a old waiter. The food was bad, but it was food. We quickly realized that vegetarian restaurant food in Argentina was going to be pizza or pasta, and that we had left the land of sucos (fresh fruit juices of innumerable flavors) behind when stepped across the international border. However, there were naranja jugos (hoo-goes) to be had! Literally, fresh squeezed orange juice.
The next day was spent walking around town, particularly, the University of Cordoba campus, the Palacio Ferreyra (an art museum) and the Parque Sarmiento, a beautiful large green space in the middle of the city. We ended the day of exploring with a free guitar orchestra performance by a bunch of high school kids in the Paseo del Buen Pastor, a beautiful free performance space. Dinner was fairly bad ravioli with our first bottle of Mendozan Malbec!
The next day we took a bus out of town to the hometown of Alberto Granado, Che Guevara's travel buddy. The sleepy little hill side town of Alta Gracia was gorgeous. However, it was a municipal holiday and so everything was shut. We took pictures of Che's house from the outside fence, and ate empanadas at a tiny restaurant run by a very friendly Cuban couple. We also chanced upon large old mulberry trees and MFTree (reminded by the mulberry trees in her primary school in New Delhi) spent considerable time plucking handfuls of mulberries and eating them straight off the tree! Our sneakers were a royal purple mess as we walked away from the trees.
We left Cordoba to go further south to the Andes, and go wine tasting in Mendoza!
p.s: Cordoba is the capital of Fernet consumption in Argentina, but we didn't end up having any here. As an aside, San Francisco is the Fernet capital of the US! (where most of it is consumed)
Cordoba was our first brush with the phenomenon of siesta. We arrived around 11 AM at the bus station, spent an hour planning our next leg of the journey (which bus to take out of town etc.), walked the half hour to the hostel we had selected from Lonely Planet, checked in, showered, washed our clothes (we were running out!), and finally set off to have lunch. To our dismay, everything in town was closed shut. Starving, and bereft of much Spanish, we pointed our way across town and finally reached a strange restaurant run by a old waiter. The food was bad, but it was food. We quickly realized that vegetarian restaurant food in Argentina was going to be pizza or pasta, and that we had left the land of sucos (fresh fruit juices of innumerable flavors) behind when stepped across the international border. However, there were naranja jugos (hoo-goes) to be had! Literally, fresh squeezed orange juice.The next day was spent walking around town, particularly, the University of Cordoba campus, the Palacio Ferreyra (an art museum) and the Parque Sarmiento, a beautiful large green space in the middle of the city. We ended the day of exploring with a free guitar orchestra performance by a bunch of high school kids in the Paseo del Buen Pastor, a beautiful free performance space. Dinner was fairly bad ravioli with our first bottle of Mendozan Malbec!The next day we took a bus out of town to the hometown of Alberto Granado, Che Guevara's travel buddy. The sleepy little hill side town of Alta Gracia was gorgeous. However, it was a municipal holiday and so everything was shut. We took pictures of Che's house from the outside fence, and ate empanadas at a tiny restaurant run by a very friendly Cuban couple. We also chanced upon large old mulberry trees and MFTree (reminded by the mulberry trees in her primary school in New Delhi) spent considerable time plucking handfuls of mulberries and eating them straight off the tree! Our sneakers were a royal purple mess as we walked away from the trees.We left Cordoba to go further south to the Andes, and go wine tasting in Mendoza!
p.s: Cordoba is the capital of Fernet consumption in Argentina, but we didn't end up having any here. As an aside, San Francisco is the Fernet capital of the US! (where most of it is consumed)
