Cordoba - January 26th

The only problem with having English language TV is that you can stay up too late watching it, and hence the next morning is a late start.  Unusually our hotel does not do breakfast itself, but give you a voucher instead for a café on the next block where for once I manage to persuade the waitress to give me diet coke instead of coffee as part of the set breakfast menu.

Then we start looking around Cordoba.  It is the second largest city in Argentina, but doesn’t feel that big.  Yet it has a lot of museums, art galleries and so on.  This is partially because it has been a major educational hub with many universities for a long time.  And the reason for this is the Jesuits.  They founded the town and its first university, and this is so important it is now a UNESCO world heritage site.  So it is to the old Jesuit block that we first head to, although a few shops are visited along the way as Dorota continues her search for the perfect pair of Argentinian trousers.  The Jesuit block itself is fine, but not that much to see here, it is after all only a block in size.  The real part of the UNESCO site are some farms 25km away from town that were built by the Jesuits to finance their operations.  But we aren’t going to get to see them as they are a bit out of the way.

After the Jesuits we continue on our shopping expedition.  Conveniently there is a very large shopping centre one block away from the Jesuit block, so we go in there, look around, and get lunch in the food court.  Afterwards when we emerge it is even hotter than before, by far our hottest day so far, so we decide to afternoon in a museum or two.  However this isn’t as easy as it seems, the first one we try only opens at 20:00, and the second one at 18:00, so we give up and go to a bar for a drink to cool off and wait them out.  We try for a third museum just after 17:00, only to get there and find it was open all afternoon and closes at 17:00.  At this point we give up on museums.  The nice map we got from the tourist office should really have had the opening hours on them.  At least one thing is certain, getting up late didn’t make us miss some of the museums.

We do wander around a bit more, there is a quite large pedestrianized zone in the centre of town with some nice shopping, and of course there are the usual plazas and churches to see, and amazingly we actually find an art gallery open so we go in there as well.  Then we go for dinner on a rooftop before heading back to the hotel, exhausted after 12 hot hours of wandering around Cordoba.