R + D | South America

If travelling is about self-discovery, I have discovered a few things about myself in the past few months. Most noticably, I am a poor planner. I´ve always known this, but it´s been made terribly obvious by watching Danielle dissect the Lonely Planet and guide us deftly through South America. I have big ideas but am short on the details. I was thinking today what it would be like to do this trip by myself (Danielle was giving me a hard time about eating all the chocolates we bought in Bariloche), and I decided it would have been a mess, although I wouldn´t have had to share the chocolates.

I made an executive decision (that Danielle actually made and told me about, I forgot, and then rediscovered and claimed as my own some weeks later) to head to Cordoba and skip the north of Argentina. Time is your enemy when you travel and overnight buses your friend. We got to Cordoba via two overnight buses with a day´s logistical stop in the beautiful city of Salta to which we will have to return one day.

Cordoba is like a miniature New York. Tall buildings, not many trees, lots of yellow taxis, and crowded sidewalks. Everyone thought it strange when we replied “como un pequeno Neuvo York” when asked “te gusta Cordoba?” But both of us were struck by the similarities. There is even a mini central park and east village (although it´s on the west side of town).

What Cordoba has which New York lacks though is an embarrassment of riches in the form of ladies underwear shops. Sure there is definitely more underwear for sale on a pound for pound basis in New York, but when it comes to underwear for sale per capita I would put Cordoba well ahead of any panty capital you can think of. At every turn we were confronted by a boutique dedicated to the trade of ropa informal or ropa feminina intima. I normally think of the buying of female undergarments as a private, if not secretive, affair. But here bras, panties, thongs, lingerie were everywhere and extraordinarily well advertised.

To go with this plethora of silk and satin were gorgeous women everywhere. All of them dark haired, dark eyed, with suave accents and no doubt great underwear. I didn´t really notice the men, but Danielle suddenly was looking everywhere and saying “ooowwww! oooohhhhh! look at him!” We held hands walking down the streets, but we were looking in opposite directions bewildered. There are a lot of hotties in Argentina.

After we arrived and situated ourselves at a coffee shop, I left Danielle to sip coffee and do Sudoku and struck out in full force to find a hostel. I looked like a New Yorker walking very quickly and with great purpose from hostel to hostel inquiring on price and checking out the beds and showers (I had made a promise to myself never to use an electric shower or a shower situated directly above the toilet bowl ever again). At the first hostel I thought the woman must have had a speech impediment because I couldn´t understand her Spanish. The second hostel disproved my theory. I thought maybe I was in the Italian immigrant neighborhood and really they weren´t speaking Spanish at all. By the third hostel I realized we had wasted three months trying to improve our Spanish in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. They were all of course speaking Spanish, I just couldn´t understand a word.

I finally found a quaint little hotel along one of the pedestrian streets and was pretty sure the receptionist told me they had a vacancy, although he could have been telling me about the latest lingerie news for all I knew. I returned to get Danielle waiting at the coffee shop with the backpacks. A battalion of Israelis had earlier followed us there and breifly occupied a few tables, but thankfully had chosen a different hostel (no doubt they negotiated a much better deal) and had vacated by the time I got back. Danielle was upset. I thought it was because I had taken so long on my reconnaissance mission, but she apparently hadn´t even noticed my absence–pretending to do Sudoku while watching the Argentinian hunks sip espresso and munch on medialunas. “I have no idea what the waiter is saying! I can´t understand anyone´s Spanish.” She had confirmed my findings. It was time to go and we asked the camarero for the cuenta. He looked at us blankly. Later we learned that the camarero is actually the mozo and the cuenta the factura.

The mighty little Collins pocket dictionary (now in two colors!) we had been travelling with for months has been no help in Argentina. The Spanish here is riddled with slang, spoken as if drunk, and the esses, ends of words and any other difficult to pronounce bits are discarded. As if the beautiful people of Argentina couldn´t be bothered with an extraneous -suffix while lounging around in their lace undergarments. In fact, Spanish here is not even called Espanol–Argentinians speak Castellano!

We settled into our old hotel, decorated in Jewish art, and took a siesta with the double doors open wide overlooking the peatonal. Dinner was more steak, the menu simply a catalouge of cow parts plus a wine list. Our third dinner in the country and we had begun to notice a disturbing trend in the salad department. I am from a family of fundamentalist salad eaters and I was starting to notice a catastrophic lack of choices under the ensaladas heading. I have since come to confirm that every restaurant in Argentina from La Quiaca to Calafate has only three types of salads: (1) lettuce, tomato, carrots (2) lettuce, tomato, carrots, onion, or (3) lettuce, tomato, carrots, onion, ham, and cheese. Really, if you look closely, it´s one salad disguised as three. The lettuce is always iceberg and the salad dressing is never mentioned–just a bottle each of industrial grade oil and vinegar sitting idly on the table. A few weeks later in a large American style grocery mega store in Mendoza, I was the only person shopping in the produce section (squeezing the peaches to assess ripeness), while the butcher, cleaver in hand, was coordinating a mob of carnivorous house wives at the very busy meat counter.

Dinner here is meat and wine and some dinner rolls to keep you busy while your 40 ounce steak is grilling. The sign of a good dining establishment is a crucified (is that lamb or a small cow?) carcass standing upright next to a fire in the window. Literally steak burning at the stake. They really are crucified and meat eating here really is a religion. The salads are for tourists. I did see a sticker on one of those peaches I bought that said the fruit was recommended by the Argentinian Cardiologist Association, an association I suspect which is not doing well in the “don´t eat too much red meat” department. The meat is magnificent though, and for a tourist, embarrasingly cheap. You can buy a filet mignon for the same price as two heads of organic Romaine lettuce in Canada.

The other part of the cow, the milk part, is sold off in heladerias. Ice-cream stores are everywhere. As if all the Starbucks in a U.S. city where suddenly turned into ice cream cafes. And they´re not empty of ice cream or customers. There are hundreds of flavors, although no red meat flavor surprisingly. It defies all tenets of modern medicine that a nation of unrelenting red meat eaters and ice cream lickers remains so thin and beautiful.

Amongst the ice cream, lingerie and beauties of Cordoba, we found an enormous synagogue. The sidewalk had the kind of concrete barricades that you see in front of U.S. embassies or places where a lot of money is stored. It was no doubt built after the two grisly attacks on Israeli targets in Argentina in the 90´s and we felt a bit suspicious taking photographs (me with my beard). Later that day when we finally met the old Jewish owner of our hotel (we had been secretly waiting to meet him ever since we noticed the Hebrew calendar on the wall), we excitedly described the first synagogue we had seen in South America. He dismissed it as nothing more than a well disguised Church with a wave of his hand an accusing “reformistas!” (Certainly a reformista sounds a lot more revolutionary than a plain old reform Jew). His fourth question (after names, country of origin and length of marriage) was whether we had kids. Shocked by our answer (and not getting the joke about our two cats), he implored us to visit the tomb of Rebbe Schneerson in Brooklyn (he´d been there twice) and leave a letter there asking for children. It was no different from the many indigenous Quechua we have met who believe two years of marriage and no kids must mean fertility problems. Only for them a flight to New York and a taxi to the Ohel in Brooklyn would be coca leaves and a swig of 100% alcohol poured on the ground as an offering to Pacha Mama.

Right next door to our hotel was a hauntingly beautiful old Cathedral with a long, warmly lit corridor coming out onto the pedestrian street. It was so inviting we were drawn in one evening. Like thousands of churches and cathedrals across South America, it was a wonderful haven from the bustle outside. A place to let your senses rest a while. Standing in front of a glass-encased and very unhappy-looking crucified Jesus was a girl in her twenties, eyes closed, and fervently praying for something. At the Jesus statue´s feet inside the glass were hundreds of folded up letters of all sizes and colors. I wondered, if we did have fertility problems, whether we wouldn´t hedge our bets and drop off requests to Pacha Mama, Jesus and Brooklyn.

The praying girl was thin, beautiful and well dressed. Whatever she was praying for, she was certainly hedging her bets too, going from one virgin´s shrine to the next and stopping for a few minutes to pray at each. She would gaze up at each well-lit statue in the darkened quiet of the Church. You don´t see this kind of day to day religious belief in the west anymore except amongst fundamentalists. It was touching.

We left Cordoba as we had come, from the bus station. The shiny double decker coaches were lined up in a semi-circle around the station. If Cordoba is New York, this was J.F.K. Each coach had the name of a different Argentine city or town and the engines were idling as they loaded up. We got on the overnight to Mendoza. It was another incredible double decker Argentine luxury liner. Seats that recline into beds, flat screen TVs, and dinner service. These buses are as close to first class as we´ll ever get.

Maybe Cordoba looked so much like New York because it was the first first world city we had seen in a few months. In any case, New York may have the Rebbe and Swiss Chard, but Cordoba has much more steak, ice cream and lingerie. I´ll take Cordoba.