Two flats and a mound

Wednesday 21 February 2012

Off to Cordoba we went today, it’s about a 600km trip, so we basically spent all day in the car. Tuna spotted that the front tyre had gone down a bit, so we went to the first servo needing both air and fuel. They had neither. The next servo had no fuel, but seemed to have an air pump. This didn’t work, so the tyre had actually gotten a lot flatter by now. Fortunately there was a tyre repair place across the street, and the chaps there sorted us out (slow side wall puncture) for 30 pesos (7 bucks). The only station with fuel after the long weekend had lines around the block. On the way out of town, there were two tankers pulled up at the station and no queue so we were on our way. Just as well as the next fuel was a good 350km away. After leaving town the road was flat and empty with low scrub to the horizon, so it was much like W.A.

Basically we just cruised along listening to music until we hit the Sierras, which were very pretty. Then we went up, then we went across, then we went down, then we were surprised when we went up again, then we had a very tight squiggly narrow bit of down.

Flat before the up

Going up

 Going across

 Very tight squiggly narrow bit of down

Then we had a 150km/h freeway, followed by suburban streets where people thought it was a 150km/h freeway and people became upset because you stopped at a red light with heavy traffic flowing past. I’m actually getting quite used to driving in Argie and managed pretty well as this was the worst traffic we’ve seen since BsAs (it is the second busiest city). The GPS drove us straight to the hotel and by 6:30 we were relaxing with an ale. It was just a driving day, but it got us to Cordoba, which even looked pretty in heavy traffic.

Moo, cluck, oink and sushi doesn’t have cheese

Tuesday 21 February 2012

View from hotel room 

A discourse on food …

Let’s start with the later. Last night we went for a walk around the street thinking that we should be able to find some restaurants for dinner. We didn’t find any and appeared to end up on the road with shops for car mechanics. We then came across a sushi restaurant. Great, something different! For entrée we shared tempura. It was nice, but rather than the tempura batter, it was crumbed and then deep fried. For main, I ordered sushi and The Albatross ordered something that appears to say ‘tuna natural’. The salmon sushi rolls were quite nice. The other thing was rather ‘different’. It was sushi rolls but with what seemed to be tinned tuna mixed with a bit of mayo and then rolled up with cream cheese.

Sushi doesn’t have cheese!!!

Over half of the sushi choices on the menu included cheese. What is it with cheese! And ham!!

Breakfast thankfully didn’t consist of cheese. It was there with ham if you wanted it. We had some nice scrambled eggs and bacon.

We went to a couple of the San Juan wineries, not quite as much of a chore as the last wineries in Mendoza. None of them looked like they would do lunch, so we headed back into town and found a café that was open.

Let me digress a short moment. There is a very strong Italian influence in Argentinian cuisine, this comes from the large number of Italian immigrants from early on. The influence is so great, that most restaurants only sell pasta and pizza,but it’s removed from great classic diverse Italian. The cafés sell pasta and pizza along with sandwiches and hamburgers. There is bad tasteless gooey cheese on everything and all the sandwiches and hamburgers will always start with cheese and ham and then add on other things. The only other type of food is the Parilla restaurant, which serves meat (these are good!!). They appear to be obsessed with adding ham and cheese to everything, take last night’s sushi for a classic example. We are getting a bit sick of everything having ham and/or cheese on it.

Back to lunch...

We chose to have pasta as we thought we could control the amount of cheese. The lasagne and spinach ravioli seemed to be wise choices. The ravioli was ok, the lasagne was not. One layer of lasagne on the bottom and one on top, finished on top with a light runny Bolognese sauce and some melted cheese. What was between the two layers of pasta? These 2.5cms had five layers of ham, one layer of spinach and two layers of the same ubiquitous bland cheddar cheese that’s on everything. Who puts five layers of ham in a lasagne!! Who puts any ham in a lasagne!!!? Isn’t there supposed to be a few layers of pasta in there!!!!? Breathe, breathe ….

The streets were deserted. You could fire a canon down any of the main roads and not hit anything. Looking on the interweb later we found out that it was a bank holiday. Everything was closed, even the supermarkets. It has been a four day weekend for carnival. We contemplated our choices for dinner over a nice refreshing dip in the hotel pool, we were thinking our options may be slim. However around 18:00 people and cars started to appear and shops started opening. I saw my narrow opportunity and went and got a haircut. Interesting task since I don’t know Spanish, and the hairdresser didn’t know English. I cheated a bit and did a google translate that that got me an ok haircut and I don’t look like a poodle. Since shops were opening, dinner looked better.

We’d already decided we were going to a nice Parilla restaurant a couple of blocks from the hotel. They had a big outdoor area which looked good. We order what we thought was the classic Parilla where we get a little bit of all the types of meat. We tried ordering two, but our waiter was adamant that we only needed one. We saw what he meant when out came the plate of meat. The meat consisted of two types of beef (moo), a bit of chicken (cluck), a nice bit of pig (oink) and a chorizo and blood sausage (woof, meow?).

Dinner was excellent. Happy.