It was a little hard
but we finally left Valparaiso aiming for Cordoba. As there are no direct
busses from Valparaiso we had to make the trip over the Andes again and get a
bus from Mendoza. This time the trip was at night meaning that scenery might as
well be replaced with a big piece of black carton covering the window. Instead of enjoying the scenery we split a bottle of wine (directly from the bottle – classy!) in an
effort to get some sort of sleep in the semi cama seats (semi cama = similar to a plane seat although with a bit more leg space).
We arrived early
morning in Mendoza and went into the first café with a wifi sign printed on the
window (which turned out to not have wifi wtf!?!) for coffe and medialunes.
Most of the day was spent in another café (which did have wifi) except for a
quick paint time killer at the abandoned trainstation.
And then it was into a different more
comfortable bus to Cordoba, once again reminding us that argentinian busses can
be simply excellent.
Cordoba does not make
a very big impression on the first sight. There are a few historical plazas and
buildings. There is the area of New Cordoba which is the more fashion forward
newly renovated area of town with expensive looking shop sand lots of cafes
around. Then there is the city centre where you find a million shops crammed
into labyrinths of malls everywhere inside all the buildings. All these shops
look the same and it makes you wonder how they can all survive when selling
pretty much the exact same stuff.
And then you have the
more industrial area which is where our hotel was – which also happened to be
the place to pick up prossies both of the female and no so female kind.
We met up with the 3
guys behind Kosovo gallery which is a relatively new gallery focusing primarily
on argentinian urban art. They have a very strong line up of artists and will
happily share their knowledge on the subject, and the space in itself is super
cool, so be sure to swing by if you are ever in the neighborhood. Urban art is relatively
new to Cordoba. The city centre is almost completely free of tags. The paint
shop is a phone number to a person who has a stash of Ironlak. It is probably the
most clean city centre I have seen during the trip – small Danish villages have
more signs of an urban art scene than Cordoba. Until we went a bit around the
city with the guys from Kosovo Gallery, we thought that it wasn’t there at all.
But it is, and it is slowly gaining strength, being perfectly in tune with the
many young students in the city.
Gualicho
Jaz & Elian
The following day Nico treated us to a great asado at his house and afterwards we went with them and painted in a nearby suburbian area.
I would have liked to explore Cordoba more in depth, but hopefully we get another chance at it someday. Thanks to Nico, Laureano and Elian for showing us a great time. We hope to see you next year!
The next and almost
final stop on the trip was Iguacu, which we reached after 21 hours in a bus. This
was the only place where painting was not on the menu. It is touristy of
course, but worth every penny! The waterfalls are amazing and it was fun to see
so many animals in the wild that we would only ever be able to see in a zoo at
home. And as hoped we got to see toucans! Yay!
Our stop here was even shorter than in Cordoba and only two days upon arrival in Iguacu, we got into yet another bus (this time a brasislian bus which is certainly a downgrade from the argentinian ones!) heading for the final destination of the trip, which was also the very first destination, Sao Paolo to chill out and paint with friends before heading back to Europe.
Thank you so much to Camilla for helping us to find a spot to paint. For showing us the absolute best way to spend a rainy day. And for getting the samba group to show us the instrument that makes the "wooo-uhh-woo-woo-uhh" sound in samba and bossa known as a quica. Who would have guessed it to be a sort of drum?
Choque Cultural |