After a few days in cordoba, we're headed to Mendoza! I liked cordoba...filled with religious history. The Jesuits pretty much created the city of cordoba, so there's a whole Jesuit block...church, university, and intense high school. The Jesuit churches are interesting. They want to be European, but have a bit of a south American flare. Our tour guide at the university was precious. She'd studied English in school, but had never been to an English speaking country, so she spoke super slowly and super clearly, enunciating every word. We were the only people on the tour, so we became best friends forever. Funny translation moment: she was talking about the cats that are randomly around the university are always meowing really loud. She said that the cats really just want to be 'cherished' or something to that effect. Cherished? Probably petted. I love awkward language moments.
On Thursday, we left cordoba and went to Alta gracia for the day. A small town famous for the museum of Che Guevara and it's Jesuit estancia, a old church/ranch thing that the Jesuits used to provide for their evangelizing of the continent. Slightly less cool than I was hoping, but still cool. We did the tour in Spanish, which was intriguing. Compared with the tours we did last summer in Cadiz, Spain, I understood so very much more. I really did feel pretty good about understanding the guide's Spanish.
The hostel in cordoba was nice. The guy that owned it told us everything we needed to see in cordoba and marked it all on a map. We met several groups of people who were taking or had taken a weeks worth of spanish classes in hopes that they would be able to get around and understand what people were saying as they traveled the continent for the next several months. I hate to break it to them, but I've been taking Spanish for years. It ain't that simple. A week is not going to get you even semi-comfortable with the language!
Today, jay and I took a chill day around the city. He'd been a bit sick, so we didn't go on a hike in a national park with condors. Instead, we went on a walk in cordoba's little park...an unattractive hunk of grassless land that led us directly to the zoo. So we spent about 2 hours looking at hippopotami, zebras, lions, etc, and even saw a show with a seal...in Spanish, a lobo aquatico. Literally? A water wolf. We finished the evening by going bowling on the top floor of a mall...space bowling to be specific. Jay barely beat me the first game, but let it be known that I dominated the second.
Now we're on our second and final overnight bus headed to Mendoza-wine country.
Sorry for the late post. This was written on Friday night but not posted til Monday evening!
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