Three Days in Cordoba, Argentina (April 2014)

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3 April 2014 – Thursday – Mendoza to Cordoba, Argentina

We caught the 6am bus for the twelve hour journey and 600 kilometres across the middle of Argentina from Mendoza to Cordoba. The road is long and straight and the landscape mostly flat and uninspiring. We had the upper deck front seats but with the sun pouring directly into our faces and the air-conditioning not functioning, it was a long hot and stuffy ride. The scenery itself was also uninteresting and consisted mainly of large tracts of cultivated fields. It seemed to be dead flat the entire distance, with the Andes far behind us and not a mountain or even a small hill ahead. The bus stopped over a dozen times at small towns on the way, none of which seemed very interesting, but it allowed us to briefly exit the bus for fresh air and to stretch our legs. We arrived and visited the tourist office located in the bus terminal for a local map and some advice and took a taxi to our small apartment which is actually half a small house located at the edge of the historical district. We were met by the elderly Argentine owner and her Canadian son-in-law and shown around while a plumber fixed a minor problem in the kitchen. We were their second tenants and they were nervously excited to ensure that we were happy and comfortable with the accommodation, which we were. The building is over 90 years old and has lovely tiled floors in all the rooms, freshly painted white walls with some interesting paintings, and very high ceilings. It is spacious, with a separate sitting room, and no television. But it does have a shelf with a small collection of English language books, including Ian Rankin, Margaret Atwood and Isabel Allende. We will be quite comfortable here for our four nights in Cordoba.

4 April 2014 – Friday – Cordoba, Argentina

We exited the apartment around 11am with a list of things to do and places to view and visit in Cordoba. As we walked across a small a bridge a man in a bright green t-shirt approached us and introduced himself as our neighbour. Herman is the son of the couple who own the house we are staying in and he lives in the rear garden apartment. We had a chat on the bridge and he invited us to join him later in the evening as he was going tango dancing.

The top priority on our ‘things to do’ list this morning was find the ‘blue dollar’ exchange and negotiate for some Argentine Pesos. We asked Herman about this and also told him that we had received an email from someone named Hector (who turned out to be his father) about exchanging money and that Olga (Herman’s mother) was coming to the apartment to at noontime to advise us on this. We had sent Hector an email informing him that we would not be in the apartment at noontime. Herman invited us back to the house and he phoned his mother who appeared shortly thereafter with a money belt filled with Argentine Pesos and we exchanged 200 US Dollars with her on Herman’s small kitchen table.

Herman was heading to the fruit and veg market and invited us to accompany him. We always go to the markets and we walked there together. Herman is a teacher of art aesthetics and psychology. We asked about the ‘blue dollar’ phenomenon and his explanation offered an opinion that it was created by the struggle between the government and the banks, with the banks more at fault in insisting on protecting its profits by keeping the Peso’s value high. We talked about many other subjects on our slow walk to the market and by the time we got there it was lunch time so we invited Herman to join us for a meal at an Arab Cafe there. We haven’t had any Arabic food for a long time and enjoyed the change in the cuisine. I had a shawarma roll that contained strips of grilled meat and Joan and Herman split a meze board selection containing hummus, vine leaves, tabouli, and minced beef. It was all very enjoyable. They also shared a bottle of Argentine Malbec wine and I had a large bottle of the local lager, Quilmes. One coffee and a couple of baklava slices completed the meal. The total cost was 362 Pesos (about 36 USDollars).

Herman went off to buy his fruit and vegetables for the week and we wandered around the market a bit. We walked back down the main pedestrianised shopping street to the main square, Plaza San Martin, and viewed the Cabildo Historico building that was used as the central offices of the Spanish colonialists and the Iglesia Cathedral next to it. We also walked along the wall of the Basilica upon which is a series of magnificent ceramic art works (all on our list of places to view or visit).

The heat and humidity, however, was sapping our energy. We wanted to go watch Herman at the milonga to dance the tango later that evening so we wandered slowly back in the direction of the apartment for an afternoon siesta.

Herman collected us at 11:30 and we walked the few blocks to the Tsunami Tango premises: a warehouse-type building with long red sashes draped down from the ceiling and a raised stage at one end and a dance floor that takes up nearly the floor space with only enough room at its edges for some small round tables and chairs. There was a tango class concluding on the stage and a few couples dancing around the main dance floor to tango music from a dj. MP3’s have killed live tango for dancing, Herman had told us. We were surprised, therefore, to see three musicians (keyboards, bandoneon and violin) setting up their equipment on the stage shortly after the class had ended and delighted to sit through their 45 minute set of tango and milonga while watching the dancers circle the dance floor, Herman among them. We returned to our apartment at around 2am tired and contented.

5 April 2014 – Saturday – Cordoba, Argentina

Today was another hot and humid day. Our walkabout started at the Saturday fruit and vegetable near the canal bank close to our apartment. There were people waiting in lines of up to ten and twelve to make their purchases. The area is known as the Paseo de Artes and many of the shops selling antiques and unusual gifts. Outside one store we met a man with three pugs (he is a very lucky man!).

We walked around the city centre, visiting the squares and churches and basilicas and Spanish Colonial buildings. This is not a pretty city to walk around. Most of the buildings are non-descript, 1970’s architecture. Except for the squares, there are very few trees hiding these mostly ugly buildings. And the people seem a bit downtrodden. There is a hard look to their faces and manner. While they are reasonably helpful when approached, they seem not to smile or make any eye contact in the street. There are many very young mothers with infants. There is a lot of dog pooh on the pavement, graffiti on the walls, and litter in the streets. Near the main fruit and veg market there are many street sellers with their wares for sale spread out on the street. This reminded us very much of our experience in Morocco where we saw this in every small town and city.

A small example, when we arrived at the apartment, our taxi driver would not drive a further 50 meters up a short hill to drop us off outside the apartment, and then he stood at the rear of his car, the trunk open waiting for me to lift one of the suitcases from it, after I had already removed the other suitcase from the front seat. We have had many similar experiences both yesterday and today (and also in Mendoza) particularly within the ‘service’ industry where the people are generally surly and indifferent. For us, these actions and attitudes demonstrate a people not happy within themselves or their lot in life. And we wonder if it is the recent instability of their currency and fear of another economic collapse or is that just the way they are.

We were a bit peckish and stopped into La Vieja Esquina, an old style ‘Empanaderia’ where we had one freshly-made and piping-hot empanada each, just to stave off any fear of impending hunger pangs. We were hoping also for a coffee but they didn’t have any. They offered us beer or wine but as it was not yet noontime we declined. We ate the empanadas while perched on stools overlooking the street, and the continued on our walkabout.

We visited the small Municipal Museum of Fine Arts which is in a fine old colonial building in the heart of the historic centre. I use the term ‘historic centre’ very loosely because it is unlike other historic centres in that it is predominantly modern buildings with only a few historic buildings, rather than nearly entirely composed of historic buildings. This museum contains a small collection of Argentine art from the 20^th century. The museum itself is a beautiful and ornate building from 1910 that was originally a family home of Dr. Felix Tomás Garzón who was married to his first cousin, Doña Carmen Gómez Garzón. It had beautifully tiled floors and a magnificent wooden stairwell and balustrade. It had some nice paintings on the lower level and some more modern and abstract pieces on the upper level that didn’t appeal to us very much.

We walked onward in search of lunch. Joan had researched and chosen an Italian pizza restaurant and we made our way there is a roundabout manner, taking short cuts through shopping arcades and stopping in a music shop to purchase three more Argentine jazz cds. On our walk we encountered not one other ‘gringo’. The restaurant was called Di Solito. It had a wood-fired oven and Joan liked it immediately upon entering and sneaking a look at the pizzas on the tables of the other diners. A father with his two sons entered immediately behind us and they were ushered to their table while we just sort of mooched over unaided to where we had decided we wanted to sit. The waitress slapped one menu on the table in front of us and departed. Eventually we were allowed to order our pizza and, thankfully, the waitress interpreted our order to be a ‘half-and-half’ because when the pizza eventually arrived on our small table it was very large, thick with cheese and covered with meats. We struggled to finish it. We managed it, however, and it was the best pizza we have had so far in South America. We shared a large Argentine lager and Joan had a class of Malbec when the pizza arrived. Our total bill was less than 20 US Dollars.

We walked back toward the apartment and came across a flea market in which over 30 people had used clothes and shoes spread on the pavement on offer for sale. We stopped into a small grocery to buy some water and night-time munchies and there was a brief downpour of rain that had been threatening all day. Briefly, it cleared the air of its humidity and a slight breeze blew through the tree-lined canal. The afternoon artesan market was closing by the time we returned to it so we just returned to the apartment for a late afternoon siesta as we were hoping to go with Herman again this evening to the open air Milonga at Plaza San Martin where on Saturday nights there is tango dancing.

Herman collected us just after 10:30 and we proceeded to Plaza San Martin. The weather, however, had turned ‘Irish’ – there was a fine misty drizzle, a ‘soft day’ – and Herman told us that there probably wouldn’t be any milonga that evening because of it. He was correct. The square was deserted and the rain increased. We considered our options and decided to have a beer and wait out the showers before heading back to the apartment. We entered a brightly-lit bar-cafe, El Ruedo, that was full of people and Herman told us it was a long-established cafe and meeting place that he has been coming to since he was a young boy. We had a drink and chatted about politics and literature, Europe and South America, the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina and the Army, crime novels and writing, until the rain abated at around 1:30am. It was most pleasant evening and made us miss going out and having a chat with our friends back home!

6 April 2014 – Sunday – Cordoba, Argentina

We woke to an Irish morning of heavy and persistent rain. It was like a rainy Sunday back home in Dublin! We sat in our small apartment reading and writing and browsing the internet and watched the rain through the window. It let up around lunch time, lucky for us as we had no food in the place. We walked to Las Chilcas, an Argentine grill-house, that was not too far away. Joan ordered a Tenderloin steak which was thick and juicy and tender and quite juicy. It came with a huge baked potato split in half and covered with sour cream and bacon bits. I ordered the traditional Argentine ‘Parradilla’: essentially, it is an Argentine mixed meat grill. My starter was a piping hot ‘criolla’ empanada starter that contained spiced beef with sautéed carmelized onions that we shared. My main course arrived in stages, beginning with two sausages and a small piece of beef steak. One sausage was pork and it was very meaty. The other was a blood sausage that Joan said was of a good quality, very like a French boudin noir. The thin steak was a little over-cooked (we have learned that Argentine’s tend to over-cook their meat) even though we had asked for it medium-rare it arrived medium-well. The three pieces of meat on the plate seemed a bit sparse and we were wondering if I had ordered the wrong thing, when the waiter appeared with a small brochette of beef and grilled peppers and a small piece of grilled pork. And a few minutes later he arrived with a beef short rib. We finished with a shared tiramisu that was moist buy a bit watery and two strong Nespressos. This is the first restaurant in South America that we have seen offering Nespresso coffee. It is also the first restaurant that charged a ‘cover’ charge (2 USD each). With a bottle of Malbec and sparkling water, our bill came to 487 Argentine Pesos (about 50 US Dollars).

The rain, which had been coming steadily down, stopped briefly enough for us to waddle back to the apartment. The humidity, however, had returned. We had been planning on walking down to the large park in the south of the city, and on the way there stopping at the bus station to arrange our tickets for tomorrow morning, but with the unpredictable weather, and everything being closed, we decided to just spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and reading and listening to the new Argentine jazz cds I had purchased.

Tomorrow we catch a morning bus to Rosario, only 6 hours eastward of Cordoba.

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