Córdoba - Argentina's 2nd city and high on my list too!

My last post on Rosario was written during my time in Córdoba where I spent a very happy few days taking in all that Argentina's second city has to offer. I took a bus, as usual, from Rosario to get there and say 'a bus' and not 'the bus' purely because the bus I got was not the one I was meant to be on! I've discovered that hostels in Argentina are bizarrely very strict on their check-in times (or at least the ones I've been to are!). Up to that point I'd been using Platform 10, a bus schedule website to check out bus times and as most of them from Rosario to Córdoba were in the very early hours of the morning they arrived by 7.30am at the latest and would have meant me hanging around for ages. As such I chose the 1.30am bus that got me in at 8.45am which was the latest possible arrival time. However, best laid plans and all that... Buses Lep, the company I was travelling with had a 1.25am bus and a 1.30am bus, the former which arrived at 7.30am and the latter which stopped more places and arrived at 8.45am. Obviously both buses said 'Córdoba' as the destination and when I asked the driver of one if I was to get on his bus, he scrutinised my ticket for an absolute age then decided 'Si' this was my bus. The seat I'd booked was free and yet something didn't feel right. Especially when we departed at 1.25am. I was on the fast bus! I can only assume he thought it would be better for me to get there more quickly, which of course is the last thing I wanted but I made it there safely and fortunately we were a little delayed and arrived at 7.50am and so I made a slow walk to my hostel, dropped off my bags around 8.30am before working out how to kill 5.5hrs until check in time! 

After a lazy breakfast of cafe con leche y dos medialunas salada, the lovely savoury croissants you get out here, I made my way to San Martin Plaza, the main square in the town where this impressive equestrian monument (to San Martin obviously!) is located:

I whiled away a good couple of hours there reading my book and then went for a wander around the town and discovered a street named after my sister's birthday!

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that they didn't name it in honour of Joanne, but because it was a important date in Córdoba's history when in 1852 the Unitary Revolution, led by Colonel Pizzaro overthrew the Governor Manuel Lopez who had been in the Government since 1835 (assuming Wikipedia's accuracy...). As an aside, many of the same street names have popped up in Mendoza, Córdoba, Rosario and Buenos Aires and are often place names or dates. I asked the guide of the walking tour I took here in Mendoza on Sunday why this is. Apparently, they're usually locations or times that were important in the liberation of Argentina and so are marked in this way. It does mean of course that I have to keep forgetting street layouts when I move places or else I could get very lost!!

Córdoba also has some lovey architecture and I was particularly fond of this one, which I think could have been the court building:

By the time 2pm came around I was absolutely shattered so did very little else after checking in than having a kip, a bite to eat and a lovely chat with a slightly older Danish couple who were driving around Argentina and Chile for 3 months and were heading off early the next day to go to Tucuman.

My first full day in Córdoba I decided to go for a wander around the new part of the town and as the guy in my hostel said that the hostel wasn't able to print out the bus ticket to Córdoba I had just bought online I needed to find somewhere to do this. Córdoba Nuevo is the area of town where the students tend to go and with it being summer holidays here, the place didn't have the usual buzz I've heard it has but it was a lovely place to visit with lots of arty shops and antique shops, which aren't really my type of thing but did give the place a really nice atmosphere. As it was then starting to concern me that I needed to print the ticket, I decided to get this done out of the way and managed to find an Internet shop with yet another incredibly helpful Argentinian guy who understood my Spanish (yay!) and between us we managed to transfer my ticket to his email address and print it out (no mean feat when you don't have wifi!). After that, I went a wander round the central part of town and headed into the cathedral which was nice enough on the outside...

But incredibly beautiful on the inside!

Outside the cathedral they have this sign which is Amo Córdoba (I love Córdoba) and I had to wait ages to take this picture! There was a family of about 8 people there taking pictures when I arrived and I swear they wanted a picture in every configuration you could have of that group!

It seems that the lovely bookshop in the theatre in Buenos Aires, El Ateneo, is part of a chain as there was one in Córdoba and as this time it was a Havanna coffee shop inside i.e. not extortionate prices, I popped in there for coffee and a snack to keep me going before heading to buy the new shoes I told you about last time, with a detour to buy another pair of cotton trousers (this time a much more sedate black and white stripe!), and then wrote my blog post for Rosario which filled the rest of the afternoon.

On Thursday, I decided to check out the park. It looked like being a slightly cooler day and with rain forecast on future days seemed like the best time to go. The park in Córdoba is vast, not so well kept as those I'm used to back in London, butt I think they aren't so representative of public parks generally. The park was split into several smaller sections and being a lover of circles I particularly liked this display in one part:

It was a nice place to visit and at one point I could hear this tremendous squawking hullabaloo going on. When I looked up I realised there were some huge bird nests in the trees...

And these are the birds that were living in them!

Not being particularly up on my ornithology I'm guessing they're some sort of parrot? And so if so, these are for you Shalini as per your request! The park had a lovely cafe in it so I took some time out for a cafe con leche (which is fast becoming my coffee of choice out here) and did a little Spanish revision! 

Having read my Lonely Planet, they recommended the north market as an interesting place to visit and as I love a god market I decided to see if they were telling the truth or not. Turns out they were! 

It's not the place to go if you have any qualms about meat and it's also true what Lonely Planet said about whole pig and goat carcasses being strung up on some stalls but there had also been a recommendation in the book to eat there too and so that's precisely what I did having 'mariscos a la wok':

And a glass of Malbec that had been chilled, so much so that it frosted the outside of the glass!

Oh yes, and was also very large!

On the way back to the hostel from lunch I stopped off at Paseo del Buen Pastor, an art gallery that showcases pieces from younger people. There were some really fun sculptures here such as this one:

But my favourite by far was this:

It sat above water so was kind of a reflection of a reflection. Trés coo-ell (or should that be muy coo-ell!). There was also a photography exhibition on and it seemed like a really nice place to sit and mooch. Along the railings people had started to attach padlocks:

I'm not sure of the reason but this reminded of the railings that I showed you in Pécs, Hungary, where thousands of padlocks had been attached to railings such that they were completely full and new ones were having to be installed to cope with the numbers being attached to them!

Paseo del Buen Pastor also had fountains...

Which when I went back in the evening put on a dancing show to music, similar to those I'd seen in Margarit park in Budapest at the start of my adventures in September.

Around the corner from here was the Capucino Cathedral (named after a priest rather than the coffee) which was so pretty!

Not sure if the colours will show up so well in the photo so here is a close up of one part to show some of the detail:

The inside was also incredibly beautiful and well worth going in to see. 

On my last day, I decided to go to the bus station to work out which platform my bus was due to go from the next day. The bus station in Córdoba is vast with around 90 platforms. There is no board to announce which platform your bus will go from, if you buy your ticket online (which I had), you have to remember to go to the desk that sells the tickets to check which platform their buses leave from and as I was getting the bus early in the morning the next day and wasn't sure what time the kiosk opened I thought it best to check in advance. Some things will never change with me regardless of how long I give myself to develop personally!

After the bus station I went to the Museo Emilio Caraffa which has a range of exhibitions from contemporary artists. I'm a big fan of contemporary art and although I often don't understand it, that doesn't detract from my enjoyment of it! Whilst there I bumped into Mara, a Finnish person I was sharing my hostel dorm with and after going round the exhibition, she and I decided to go get a bite to eat together. Lunch deals tend to be quite good value out here with a main course, dessert and drink for around £6-8. And so I had a langoustine and egg salad, followed by fruit salad - fruit and veg, woohoo!! That afternoon I just headed back to the hostel to repack my bag ready for the next day's early departure and in the evening had a few drinks in the hostel with Mara. On Saturday, I got up bright and early for my 11.5hr journey to Mendoza which is where I am at the moment! I have been having a blast here so far, which is why it's taken me until now to tell you all about Córdoba! I'm leaving here on Sunday to go to Santiago, Chile. So look out for the next post all about my time in the wine region which will be heading your way around then!!