Return from Heaven

Wednesday, Jan. 27

It´s another cloudy, but dry, day in the mountains. It is too bad there couldn´t have been more sunny days like the one when I arrived.

My cold is still lingering after a week. It is down to a rynny nose and frequent sneezes. The mucous is so clear now that the cold may have been replaced by allergies to something in the area.

I checked out of the hotel and went to the park to read. I am only 80 pages from the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have really enjoyed reading it. It is very confusing because of the use of the same names over and over in different variations for continuing generations of the same family, but there is a chart showing the family tree at the beginning that I keep referencing regularly to keep it all straight.

I am leaving here by bus at 1:50 p.m. for Tucumán where I hope to get a ticket on the night bus to Córdoba that leaves at 10:30. That should give me some time to get onto a good computer and to have a nice lunch.
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We arrived on time. The first bus company with service to Córdoba was sold out of seats already. Fortunately, there are two other companies with night buses on the same route. The second ompany I checked had a ticket.

I walked about 6 blocks from the station to a nearby cyber cafe I had seen on Sunday. I spent two hours updating my blog and dealing with e-mail. Fortunately, it was a place with a broadband connection that worked well.

Next, I returned to the station and ordered a sandwich. It´s called a Super Pronto, and it is really just a poor quality chichen salad sandwich. It had chopped chicken (very little), sliced boiled egg, tomatoes, olives, and lettuce and was topped with melted cheese.

Walking: 15,545 steps (6859 aerobic steps), 652 calories, 10.5 km (6.3 miles)

Thursday, Jan. 28

The overnight bus trip wasn´t bad. The seats seemed to be wider than normal and spread further apart. My seatmate stayed on his side for the most part. He hardly moved during the night. We arrived at 6:30 a.m., and the tourist office was open by the time I had gotten my luggage and found it. They called a place my guidebook recommended to be sure a room was available before I walked there.

I am not too pleased with the room and will move to another place I have found tomorrow. It is okay, but the window looks out at the top of a skylight and concrete walls. It was fine for resting after the trip. I slept 3 hours this morning before I cleaned up and went out. And it will be fine for tonight, too.

Córdoba is nice. It is obviously a large, somewhat sophisticated city. There is a nice mixture of highrise and lowrise living. People are out at night in the neighborhoods, sitting and visiting in fronts of their buildings or in the neighborhood plazas. There isn´t much architecture left from previous centuries, however. Much of the city is fairly new with just a few old places still in existance. Salta is a much nicer city in terms of nice old buildings, but this place is definitely a bigger place with more variety of things to do.

I spent the late morning wandering the streets to get a general idea of the place. While doing that, I found a place crowded with local people and decided it was the right spot to eat. I had mixed cannelone with half a carafe of the house wine. The cannelone were so creamy and delicious. And while I was eating them, I watched to see what others were eating. The vegetable tart looked good. And the plates of linguine topped with various types of meat looked good. I may have to go back there again for another meal.

I returned to the room and slept another 3 hours. I was just so tired from the trip, and the heat and the wine also had their affect on my body. Then I was out exploring again. I have walked, walked, walked today, but I have limited myself mainly to parallel streets going north/south. Tomorrow, I will attack the east/west streets and also start to go into some of the museums, I guess.

Walking: 28,637 steps (24,309 aerobic steps), 1154 calories, 19.47 km (12 miles)