Pajeros de Toros - Blogabond

Still trying to recover from our bender in Valparaiso and Santiago, we had chosen our hostel in Cardoba for it's lack of reputation as a party hostel. For some reason, the online booking system had been down, so Joanne had booked it over the phone. The AR$25 price online was old, they told her, because they have made improvements, and it's now AR$35; a bit more than we had paid until now, but not the end of the world. The hostel, called Hostel Art, did look very nice, and it had a lovely patio on the roof, but the dorm was really cramped, there was no wifi as advertised and, for the first time in South America, breakfast was not included. Not very good for the money: I don't care if it looks nice, I want substance!

Cordoba

It's sunny!

Aware of our short time in Cordoba, we headed straight out as soon as we had dumped our bags. The city was surprisingly ugly. That's unfair: there wasn't as much of the nice architecture as we had expected. We were there for the reputedly nice architecture but San Martin Plaza, the main square, which is supposed to be a highlight, was all off limits because of building or restoration work, or maybe they were just trying to remove the graffiti that seems to be everywhere in Argentina. We walked around the central area looking for colonial buildings, but didn't see much, so we walked around Neuva Cordoba, looking for many examples of 19th Century buildings converted into bars and restaurants, but we didn't find them either,

Plaza San Martin - off limits

and there seemed to be building works all over the city. We gave up on architecture for a while and headed into the park. Even the park was ugly because of graffiti and construction. How can you need to do so much building in a park? It may be that we just missed it all because our guide book is not detailed enough to give anything more specific than areas, but we practically carried out a box search after leaving the park; maybe it's just that we are really spoiled with European cities and it takes an awful lot for a city to look beautiful to us. Still not very impressed with Argentina.

Graffiti

Cordoba

Neo-Gothic Iglesia Sagrado Corazon

We went to look around the Jesuit ruins but we couldn't find any sign of the guided tour and gave up, since there are much better examples further north and in Paraguay. We passed a demonstration, which seems to be an Argentinian institution: we had hard demonstrations every day we were in Mendoza as well.

Demo

Cordoba

A particularly bad piece of public art

Beer

At least the weather was nice, and it was almost warm in the sun. We stopped off at a (definitely not 19th Century) restaurant for a menu del dia at AR$25, having happily established that fifteen pesos is too little in Mendoza, but I had terrible trouble communicating with the waiter.

Beer

I had begun to feel quite good about my little bit of Spanish, but suddenly I could understand nothing: I had asked him for the contraseña for the wifi, but after several attempts I still couldn't get it; he had said to me what sounded like “siette ve ce siette y un ocho”, which I understood all of except for the “ve ce” bit. A failing I had discovered in my Spanish dictionary is that it does not tell you how to pronounce the names of letters if something is spelled out, so numbers were fine, but I had no idea about letters. Considering this gap in my knowledge, I reckoned that “ve ce” was probably letter V and letter C. I tried 7vc718, I tried with uppercase letters, I tried W instead of V, but none of them worked. Eventually I called the waiter back over and asked him again. After repeating it several times, which was no help, he finally thought to “siette: un, dos, tres, ... , siette!” and it clicked: he had said siette veces siette, seven times seven. Whew! I tried again, 777777718, and still got nothing. Then the last penny dropped: 77777778. Seven sevens and one eight. I'm sure he could have explained it more clearly, or just written it down for me.

Cordoba

Argentine flag

An old car

It's amazing how much difference your ability to speak another language can be sabotaged by a native speaker who is totally insensitive to the fact you can't really speak the language, yet with other, more intelligent people I suppose, they can really make your life so much easier. Even ordering and paying the bill with Visa was difficult with this guy: rather harassed by my inability to communicate, I asked him in Spanish “do you have Visa?” instead of “do you take Visa?”. You would think it should be easy enough to work out what someone who has just asked for the bill is really trying to say. I even pointed at the Visa sign, but he eventually managed to hear “Visa” as “cerveza” instead of just seeing the obvious mistake. Later, chatting to a Porteño with less English than we have Spanish, we discovered that the accent in Cordoba is particularly unusual, so that probably contributed to the lunch time debacle. When he realised we were going to have communication problems he said podemos comunicar sin idioma, “we can communicate without langauge”. Only later did we discover that really was his fields: he had been staying in Cordoba for two months busking with marionettes and making good money apparently. In fact we were able to get by on Spanish rather than non-verbal communication. In most (or all?) of Argentina they slur the “y sound” for both letters Y and LL and pronounce it like the second G in “garage” in French. So amarillo, yellow, becomes something like amarijjo. In Cordoba this guy told us, they also slur the double-R, so that perro, dog, becomes something like pejjo. It is quite liberating talking to someone who has no option to switch into your own language: we just had to muddle through, without feeling at all embarrassed about how badly we were doing. But it was hard work and after the second bottle of wine we started to give up. Anyway, we were hungry, so we got directions to an empanada place and left.

Argentinian empanadas

More Argentinian empanadas

We had been told in Chile by several people that the best empanadas in South America are in Argentina, so we were keen to try them, despite having been totally sick of the Chilean ones. They were much nicer. Rather than greasy, flaky pastry, it was a plain short-crust pastry (I think, not too good with pastry terminology) and the meat filling was more interestingly flavoured. Back at the hostel we caused some amusement when we realised that other people staying there, for a conference, were not animators as we had heard but animal inseminators or maybe it was animal maters we had first been told.

Greek Orthodox church

written by

The Happy Couple on September 25, 2009 from Cordoba, Argentina

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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