Restaurants were the major find in Córdoba. At San Honorato you’re seated, order your food and wine, and then go down to the wine cellar where they court you with free wine and appetizers until your meal is ready. Nice!
Just about exactly six months ago it was fall and we were in Córdoba. Here it is six months later and it’s fall again – that came around fast! – and we’re in Córdoba again. Weird. The first one, of course, was in Spain, in the northern hemisphere. Now we’re in the southern hemisphere, fall again, but this time Córdoba, Argentina.
And then there was this Lebanese restaurant. You can see how happy Mark is with baba ganoush and kibbeh nayyah and raki. That’s living.
We weren’t great tourists in Córdoba. We didn’t go to any of the museums and pretty much just wandered aimlessly when we weren’t hanging out in San Martin Plaza, the city’s main square. We did manage to wander around the UNESCO-recognized Jesuit Block, a group of 17th century buildings founded – not surprisingly – by the Jesuits. We found some pretty good restaurants, though doing so is a bit of a challenge. One of our typical strategies is to go out around 7:00 PM or so after doing some TripAdviser research and just see what looks good. You do that in Córdoba and the places you’re looking for are closed up tight. Not a soul moving or setting things up. That doesn’t start until 8:00 or so and places don’t get busy until maybe 10:00 PM. We’d make reservations for 9:00 or even 9:30 and we were still among the first in the restaurant.
Córdoba’s cathedral with it’s beautiful Romanesque dome overlooks Plaza San Martin, the city’s main square
Two other strange things about Córdoba. I went out for morning runs a couple times and by 7:15 or so there were already a number of people lined up at the door of banks, waiting for them to open a couple hours later. What’s that all about? There must be something really inefficient or screwed up about banks there that people would line up for hours in the morning to get in.
The coolest government building ever. In the daytime the architecture looked modern and interesting but at night, lit up like the Argentine flag, it was really something
Ultimately, after conferring a couple times with management, she gave us our boarding passes, but another woman from the back office came out and explained to us that you always need to show an outbound ticket to get into a country; they want to make sure you’re not going to just stay. All this on the third anniversary of leaving Cambridge when we’re pretty savvy travelers – Uruguay is our 50th country just since leaving the U.S. – and we’ve never had this experience. Strange.
OK, on to Uruguay!
Parque Sarmiento is a huge green space in the middle of the city. We went there on Sunday afternoon when there were a lot of locals enjoying May Day.
One of the stranger museums we’ve ever been to was in this grand old bank building. It was free, with a little bit of mostly modern art, but the best display was just the old bank building itself.
The Cathedral’s interior is grand, though I thought it paled compared to Salta. We are, of course, big church goers as we travel from city to city.
Enjoying dinner at another great Córdoba restaurant. One of the best parts of eating here – perhaps in all of Argentina – is that wine is everywhere, incredibly cheap, and exceptionally good. In a nice restaurant you can get genuinely good wine for $10 or less. Hard to beat.
And finally, we loved this display in the window as we walked by. I mean, what bride wouldn’t want to see her bridesmaids in … that?