We’d been staying in such a nice place that we were reluctant to leave, but finally got on the road to Cordoba around 1 pm or so.\u00c2\u00a0 We drove past lots of sunflowers, through a little town famous for green onyx (but which didn’t seem to offer any for sale), and through a seemingly endless string of foothill resorts.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally we left them behind going on a very pretty road over a pass.\u00c2\u00a0 If we’d stayed on the main road, we would have gone to a reputedly very glitzy town with lots of over-the-top casinos.\u00c2\u00a0 As it was, we ended up going over another hill past an observatory, like getting to San Jose via Mt. Hamilton, and we arrived in Cordoba around 10 pm.\u00c2\u00a0 Except it was really 11 pm because we were in the eastern time zone.\u00c2\u00a0 By midnight, all we could find was a few empanadas and ice cream cones, which were welcome after the 9-hour drive, thought we were still a little full from the night before.<\/p>\n
We got up late, and our plan to go on an 11 am tour was derailed by a parade downtown featuring scantily clad young girls, a drag queen, and lots and lots of drummers.\u00c2\u00a0 They ended up drumming inside the city building, making the tourist information unavailable — when we found out where the tourist information department had set up a government in exile, all they said by way of explanation was that the parade was a neighborhood parade traditionally, and now they wanted to have their parade downtown but weren’t allowed to, and it turned into a protest instead.<\/p>\n
The guidebook’s suggestions weren’t working well.\u00c2\u00a0 The Museum of Memory was closed, as was the domestic chapel of the Jesuit seminary.\u00c2\u00a0 Others had made slight changes to their hours of operation so that they were closed for the day by the time we got there.\u00c2\u00a0 We did get to the World Heritage site, a Jesuit university and church which had a really good English-language tour.\u00c2\u00a0 It was the first tour ever in which we’d heard someone say that a building was constructed by African slaves.<\/p>\n
There were many cute facts about the room where students had their oral exams for their PhD, including that they got ridden around town on a mule if they passed, and had rotten fruit thrown at them if they failed.\u00c2\u00a0 The room itself had been largely destroyed in 1918 during a student revolt.\u00c2\u00a0 This was a replica.\u00c2\u00a0 When the students in 1968 occupied the Sorbonne, they shouted slogans in the memory of the 1918 revolt.<\/p>\n
It will certainly be time for college revolts again soon, and I hope that the slogans shouted will not be in the format of Hey.\u00c2\u00a0 Hey.\u00c2\u00a0 Ho.\u00c2\u00a0 Ho.\u00c2\u00a0 If there is one thing the North needs to learn from southern revolutions, it is not that people in berets look good on t-shirts, it is that not all explanations of political philosophy need to begin with “1-2-3-4” or even be in four four time.\u00c2\u00a0 The drummers in the march on the tourist office were polyrhythmic, even though they only had the drums of an ordinary high school marching band.\u00c2\u00a0 And any revolution, as Rosa Luxemburg will tell you, needs drag queens and six year old dancers in g-strings shaking their booty, unless perhaps they are demonstrations against the inappropriate sexualization of very young children.<\/p>\n
There was a large library of books from the 16th century and before.\u00c2\u00a0 And there was a very beautiful church, made several hundred kilometers away in Misiones (where we’re headed soon) and moved piece by piece down the Parana river and across the land to Cordoba.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like Ikea, some assembly required.<\/p>\n
At one point the tour guide came to describe a small piece of furniture which was characteristic of Argentinean offices and homes through the 19th century.\u00c2\u00a0 It is called a “bargue\u00c3\u00b1o” and this one looked like a small card catalog with a closing front mounted on modestly curved desk legs.<\/p>\n
The tour guide, Maria Celeste, was of college age and the other four people on the tour were approximately the same.\u00c2\u00a0 The tour guide motioned to the cabinet and said: think of this like a computer.\u00c2\u00a0 Each one of these drawers is a file, and in this one [the prelate] stored letters from Spain, and in this one correspondence with the estancias, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Later, after the tour had ended, I attempted to explain to Maria Celeste’s work mate, a bit older, how I found it ironic that filing cabinets were now described in terms of computers, after the User Interface guys had been so clever as to designate the contents of tracks and cylinders as “files” to facilitate understanding.<\/p>\n
For dinner we took the bottle of Angelica we’d bought, and checked out two nice restaurants a block apart.\u00c2\u00a0 One, La Nieta ‘e La Plancha, had a “creative” menu and a terrace, and the other, El Arrabal normally had tango shows and was very traditional.\u00c2\u00a0 The “creative” one had goat and rabbit and looked promising, but as soon as I pulled the bottle out of the pack the lady freaked out and seemed like she’d never heard of “corkage”.\u00c2\u00a0 We walked out slowly, giving her a chance to chase after us.\u00c2\u00a0 Apparently the opportunity to sell us her own wine was more important to her than the opportunity to sell us a meal at all.\u00c2\u00a0 We went down the street to the tango restaurant, which was also initially negative about the idea.\u00c2\u00a0 But after they looked at the label, they said “wow, that’s really great wine” and offered to open it for 10 pesos ($3).\u00c2\u00a0 And great it was.\u00c2\u00a0 Their traditional menu went with it well.\u00c2\u00a0 The gnocchi in sweetbread cream sauce surprisingly paired better with our malbec than the lamb raviolones in malbec sauce, whose malbec was not as deep as the one we’d brought.\u00c2\u00a0 And Argentina doesn’t produce any wines that don’t complement beef.<\/p>\n
In the morning we went to the Jesuit crypt in town.\u00c2\u00a0 Another underground treasure recently discovered by telephone workers.\u00c2\u00a0 It was actually kind of dumb because the Jesuits were banished before they actually buried anyone in it.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s so special about a crypt without coffins or bones?<\/p>\n
On the way out of town, we visited one of five Jesuit estancias in the area.\u00c2\u00a0 And why would a World Heritage Jesuit ranch museum forbid cameras?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe because some cameras have flash and most tourists are too stupid to know how to turn off the flash.\u00c2\u00a0 If you know how to turn it off, it’s a dumb policy.\u00c2\u00a0 We went to Estancia de Jesus Maria and just looked at what was there.<\/p>\n
Then we drove about five hours to Santa Fe, where we are now.\u00c2\u00a0 On the way, outside of Devoto, was a cemetery with several large family mausoleums, right in the middle of nowhere.\u00c2\u00a0 It looked like a small city.\u00c2\u00a0 We took lots of pictures.<\/p>\n
In Santa Fe, we went to an old restaurant which serves you various river fish.\u00c2\u00a0 Large portions of several different kinds.\u00c2\u00a0 No vegetables, no dessert, just fish and drinks.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t billed as all-you-can-eat, but they probably would have kept on bringing more if we’d asked.<\/p>\n
The next week is in northeastern Argentina.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re just about to start a long drive to Reserva Provencial Estero del Ibera, a good place to see capybaras and birds.\u00c2\u00a0 Then we’ll spend a day or two seeing more Jesuit missions (rent “The Mission” to see what they were about).\u00c2\u00a0 Then we’ll visit Iguazu Falls on the Brazil border.<\/p>\n
Time to get on the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’d been staying in such a nice place that we were reluctant to leave, but finally got on the road to Cordoba around 1 pm or so.\u00c2\u00a0 We drove past lots of sunflowers, through a little town famous for green onyx (but which didn’t seem to offer any for sale), and through a seemingly endless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/antarctica\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}