Apologies for the waning updates… Sadly not due to any madly busy traveller fun, but to our equally waning activity. We’ve just been taking it easy for a couple of weeks, hanging out in the appropriately laid-back cities of Córdoba and Mendoza.
Bustling but chilled-out university cities, filled with cafés and leafy plazas. So we’ve been fitting in and acting like students again, waking up around noon and going to the market for cheap eats, sitting in cafés reading, and watching probably a tad too much TV.
Loving Córdoba’s city centre, comprised of about eight blocks of walking streets, where in between the sidewalk cafes, every other shop is a bookshop – and in case that wasn’t enough to satisfy the literary appetites of the academic populace, a book fair filled the central plaza, with its motley assortment of Grishams, Heideggers, and bibles.
But we haven’t been completely lethargic; we did drag ourselves beyond the confines of Córdoba’s pedestrian haven and visited the supposedly popular lakeside town of Carlos Paz. It was like Benidorm without the beaches. Which begs the question, why do people go there? We played air hockey in a games arcade and entertained ourselves rearranging park benches. Unfortunately the lake somehow proved hard to find, and in any case, high season was clearly not midwinter.
So we made our merry way to Mendoza, heart of the wine lands, and city of tree-lined avenues, long siestas, and so many attractive plazas it becomes hard to navigate.
According to a friendly but rather tipsy old man in a bodega we visited, the climate is perfect, and usually only cold and rainy for a week each year. Unfortunately that week was this week. So I can’t help but feel that Mendoza is usually a far nicer place to be, when its many trees actually have leaves, when being outdoors is not such a traumatic experience, and when people look a little less miserable and desperate to hibernate.
But, we soldiered on, took a tour of a lovely bodega and wine museum, in English this time so it was far more informative (I finally understand why red and white wine are different), and drank the many free glasses of wine offered by the aforementioned tipsy old man.
Apart from that, as I say, we’ve just been hanging out… Went on a long useless walk around a vast park yesterday, trying to find a small hill, and failing. Don’t ask. Been eating so many empanadas you’d think we’d be sick by now, and searching desperately for the churros rellenos that are one of the few things from Peru I really miss (for those of you who are fans of the deep-fried doughy goodness that is the Spanish churro – the relleno variant is amazing! a different breed to those dipped in cups of chocolate, but filled with dulce de leche, a sweet cream that I may need to stock up on before we leave).
Tomorrow we’ll be back in Chile, staying in Santiago for my birthday weekend, and I’m more excited than is probably appropriate for an adult.
