I’m sooo behind! Here’s what I’ve been up to in the last couple weeks:
Thursday morning (the 9th?) we arrived in Cordoba after the usual overnight bus ride and managed to figure out how to take a bus to the hostel. We showed up tired and dirty and told the owner about our reservation. “No,” he said immediately, without even looking anything up. “You don’t have a reservation here.” After a drawn-out, confusing dialogue, we eventually discovered that the third-party hostel website (don’t use Hostelworld.com!) had screwed us over, and the hostel was in fact completely full. The owner kindly helped us call all the hostels in the city, but they were all booked for Easter weekend. Eventually we found a hotel in a good location for $70 each/night instead of $35 each for the hostel (that is, 20USD vs. 10USD). It was about as nice as a hostel though; I’m not sure how they can get away with charging twice as much.
They have these odd showers here that aren’t at all enclosed, not even by a shower curtain; it’s just the corner of the bathroom. They provide a squeegee-type mop thing, but I’m not very good at using it so the bathroom is always wet. I guess it’s much cheaper than installing a whole shower.
Anyway, after a much-needed shower we went in search of much-needed empanadas. We tried some empanadas arabes, which I think are a Cordoban specialty. They are triangular and lemony and yuuuuumy. Rose and I chatted for a while with the Taiwanese shop owner, who got really excited when we started talking about Chinese things like bubble tea (which I still haven’t gotten here, but I hear it can be found in Barrio Chino). He was comically paranoid about counterfeit money—he gave us a long lecture about it and had built his own little light box into his counter so he could check each bill.
We wandered around and saw pretty churches (the first five pictures) and found a fancy artisan food fair, with things like alfajores and jelly made of interesting fruits. I bought some tiny pouches of honey so I can put honey in my tea at cafés, and some amazing nuts that I can’t find in Buenos Aires—it’s a walnut covered generously in dulce de leche covered in icing. Oh man, I have to find some here!
That reminds me, I’ve never explained alfajores! They are kind of like big oreos, but the cookie part isn’t chocolate and the icing part is dulce de leche (which is HUGE here. It’s kind of like caramel). There are plenty of varieties; they might be covered in a bath of chocolate or icing, or have coconut on the outside of the dulce de leche. Mmmm, I think I’m going to have to go eat one now…
For dinner that night I tried tuna pizza, which was great. Rose and Emily’s pizza had salsa golf, which is not so great. It’s just ketchup and mayonnaise mixed. While we were eating we saw a very long line of people walking to church. They looked like zombies.
Friday until Sunday I went to Villa del Dique, a little lakeside town outside of Cordoba. It was very relaxing and lovely and full of hiking, lake-viewing, and even stargazing. On one hike I saw a HUGE praying mantis (4-5 inches huge!) and some nectar robbers. I was really excited about the nectar robbers because I’d never seen them before in real life. They were big black bumblebees who kept landing on the neck of flowers but not going inside: they were puncturing the flower and stealing the nectar without providing the flower any pollination service in return.
I also saw the strangest looking dog I’ve ever seen. What breed is that thing??
On one of the hikes (see picture below) we did a lot of rock clambering and it reminded me how much I love rock climbing…I really need to find a gym in BA. On the way done from that one we wanted to take the “easy” way and followed a road that ended up going WAY out of the way, ha ha. So much for shortcuts.
Funnily enough when we showed up in the hotel in Villa del Dique, the hotel guy again said, “No, you don’t have a reservation,” even though this time it had already been paid for and everything. But he ran off for a minute and figured it out, phew!
The week after Cordoba we had to do a Spanish presentation that was very open-ended. The timing was really terrible because EVERYONE went out of town for Easter weekend. It was due Thursday. Monday night I emailed people at Hecho en Buenos Aires to see if I could talk to someone for a few minutes about the magazine. Homeless/unemployed people buy the magazine for 90 cents and sell it for $3, and it usually has articles about arts, culture, and social issues. I didn’t get a reply all day Tuesday, so Wednesday I decided to just go to their office. There was a man there who worked for the magazine. “Hi, I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes for my class project?” “No, sorry, you have to send us an email.” “I did a couple days ago.” “They take a while to get back to you.” “Well, my project is due tomorrow. Can I just have five minutes with you?” “No, you have to go through them, but you can get information from our website.” “Yeah, I already read everything on the website, it’s very informative, but you see I want to do this in the style of a radio show. I just need to record a few quotes about the magazine, so the website doesn’t really help with that. And it’s only for a class project, I’m not with the actual media, only ten people are going to hear this.” But he refused to talk to me! I was (am) so mad. I know, it's completely my fault for doing it last-minute, but still. All he would do was tell me where I could find some vendors. So I went to Plaza de Mayo and found one right away, and took him to a café (actually a Burger King, he chose) to ask a few questions. It was an ok interview, but I needed more, so I went to Florida St, which is covered in street vendors for something like 20 blocks. All the other vendors that I asked said, “Oh yeah, there’s always some around here,” but I walked up and down Florida for almost two hours searching for a magazine vendor, and couldn’t find a single one! So I ended up just using the website for information and the interview for quotes. Not good. But at least it was a little bit of practice with a new editing software that I need to learn.
In painting class we just finished the third one, and it’s the first where we added a new color—brown. Exciting! At first I was worried—infinitely more possible shades!—but then I realized that it’s nice because in fact I don’t have to focus nearly as much on color. It’s much easier to make two similarly-colored brown objects two different shades of brown than to make two similarly-colored gray objects two different shades of gray.
Last Friday I finally went to the National Fine Arts Museum with Ian and Rose. We looked at the entire Argentine collection, from ancient carvings to modern and everything in between. My favorites were the carvings and maybe 30% of the modern. I really liked these three in the modern section that were old-fashioned portraits with slight twists: the boy had a huge rose in front of half of his face; the old woman was sort of fading or melting; the old man had some holes chipped out of his face.
Saturday night I went to a homemade pizza birthday party at Virginia’s apartment. It was fun when I was having more intimate conversations, but when everyone was talking all around me it was just too hard to follow and I got lost. I had an awkward moment with Virginia because I forgot that she had just traveled to Houston for a couple days for work, and she said something to me about going to malls and then about Katy Mills, and I got all excited—wow, we have one of those in Houston, how weird!
Sunday we went to El Tigre with IES. It was a pleasant day, but not that exciting of a place. Although I might have to return for the roller coaster park. We took a boat ride down a dirty river (above) and then went to a huuuge market and later to a pretty art museum. I tried my first choripan (chorizo + pan), which was a hunk of sausage on French bread with chimichuri sauce. I dropped it on the sidewalk and my friends convinced me to eat it anyway, which may be the grossest thing I’ve ever done. Not that it was covered in dirt or anything, but still.
My favorite part of the day was walking through the market while eating a fresh pomegranate. Somehow it felt so beautiful and perfect. Pomegranates make me so happy. Below is the museum.
This week I finally, finally sent Jenn a complete draft of my research paper from last summer! YAY! I had a happy moment when I looked at the 20-something page document and thought, “I did this. I wrote a real research paper.” Well of course I had loads of help but anyway. I know it will take loads of revision still, but I’m happy to have it all down.
Something I’ve noticed here is that waiters are not as nice. In general the attitude of “the customer is always right” is missing here. Not that I’m complaining, it doesn’t bother me. But I think I just figured out one of the main differences: most waiters don’t smile at you. Don’t they always smile in the States? Maybe because tipping here is only 10%, and not quite as mandatory, so they aren’t all trying to be friendly for the tips.
My mate gourd cracked the other day. It looks more decorative than useful, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but when I bought it I asked the vendor if it would last forever since it didn’t have any metal, and he assured me that it would. I guess I’m a sucker. I just hope this isn’t a bad omen symbolizing the deterioration of my trip.
PS The title is a quote from a song by The Books.
