Oh Cordoba... :-P

Mike and I arrived this morning in Mendoza, which I adore so far! But before that, we stopped over in Cordoba. If we had gone directly from Iguazú to Mendoza, it would have been a 36 hour bus ride, so we decided to break it up by spending one night in Cordoba.

Now Cordoba might be a very nice place. If you were an art student, you would probably love living in Cordoba. And apparently there´s a lot of beautiful natural wonders surrounding the area outside of Cordoba. But if you are a tourist who is really interested in going somewhere else, well, let´s just say Cordoba didn´t quite stack up to the other places we´ve seen here.

According to our map, the hostel we´d booked didn´t look to be that far from the bus station. So we decided to walk. It turned out to be about 15 blocks away, uphill the entire time. The hostel then turned out to be a little bit gross. And it had the weirdest bathroom I´ve ever seen. The sink, toilet, and shower head were all in one tiny room that was about 3 by 3 feet, with no shower curtain to separate anything. So when you shower, you just squirt water all over the entire bathroom. The bathroom is equipped with a squeegie and a sign requests that you squeegie the giant puddle of water toward the slow, tiny drain when you´re finished showering. Weird.

After this harrowing experience, we decided to go see the city. We´d read about this beautiful, huge park where we decided to have a picnic. When we got there, we discovered a ginormous dustbowl. Literally, dust was just blowing everywhere amongst acres of dead trees.

We did manage to find a really cool art museum. We also listened to a free blues show (which was sadly mediocre) inside a big public cathedral, and we watched a documentary in a cine that shows independent films. Overall, though, we spent the majority of our time eating and sitting in little restaurants, waiting to go to Mendoza.

But NOW, now we´re in Mendoza. And it´s BEAUTIFUL! It´s all laid out around these five main plazas that are just gorgeous with lush green grass, flowers, trees, fountains, and pretty tilework. We´ve just gotten started exploring, but so far it´s looking like Mendoza may turn out to be my favorite Argentinian city. I guess we´re off to find out!