Heat waves and culture in Cordoba

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After a torturous eleven hour bus trip from Buenos Aires with no food and no stops we arrived in Cordoba which is Argentina's second biggest city and holds the title of Cultural Capital of the Americas. It had a lot to live up to.

We arrived at the hostel at about 10pm and were absolutely starving, but we were delighted to be greeted by Jujuy the hostel dog. We headed straight out to find some nosh and wine. The city looked really cool at night and we were looking forward to seeing it during the day.

As we only had one full day in Cordoba itself we decided to cram as much in as possible so got up at 10am, fairly early for us, and hit the streets. At this time of year Cordoba is meant to be cold, similar weather to January in the UK, but it so happens that they are currently experiencing freak weather and it was boiling. We first went to see the sites around the main plaza which included an amazing Cathedral which was being renovated and many other old colonial style buildings.

We started to head towards the area of the city where all the museums and other sites were but kept getting distracted along the way by more beautiful buildings, churches and pretty plaza's. One church in-particular caught our eye. It was huge and made of different coloured stone; it had gargoyles and amazing carvings all over it. The next place we visited was the Art Gallery which was in a large, beautifully restored old mansion. The collection was brilliant, one of the most interesting exhibitions was that of Carlos Alonso whose paintings were pretty dark and disturbing. Look him up.

We carried on walking in the lovely sunshine and soon arrived at the city zoo. We decided to visit it after missing out on the one in Buenos Aires. It was home to many different animals from hippos, tigers, orangutans, parrots, elephants and more. The rules in South American zoos seem more relaxed and it was possible to get much closer to the animals, most of which are very dangerous. Although we didn't feel threatened when we were stroking the zebra. This also meant that the grotty children and some adult visitors felt they had the right to launch empty drinks bottles and popcorn at the animals in an attempt to get a reaction from them. Not nice for two animal lovers like us. However most of the animals seemed happy enough, but we left looking forward to being able to see some of them in the wild during our travels.

We got up early the next morning and got a bus to Alta Gracia which is a small town about an hour away from Cordoba and is most famous for being the place where Che Guerava spent his childhood. We visited his childhood home which is now a museum, but we felt the towns best attraction was the old Jesuit commune and church, which was beautiful and gave a good insight into how they lived. After pottering around for a while we went to get the bus back to Cordoba.

That night, our final night in Cordoba, we decided to be sociable and partake in the hostel BBQ. The meat was slightly suspect, in-particularly the sausages which were made out of some unidentifiable meat which looked like brains. We still ate it though. We ended up having quite a few litre bottles of beer and had a good night chatting to all the other guests. However one Australian moron, who was a fountain of pointless knowledge, decided to adopt the role of quiz-master and started to ask a string of questions and bore us all with useless facts in an attempt to impress everyone.
"Do you know what Greenland's biggest export is?", "Do you know what the population of Canada is?"
"No we don't, now go away you prat!"

We went to bed at about 4am and got a few hours sleep before getting the bus to our next stop, Villa Carlos Paz.

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