Notes about Argentina

These are some unedited and unordered notes I took during the trip - just a few places and events that interested me enough to motivate me to actually write something.

Soccer in Argentina

I had to spend a few hours in various bus stations waiting for buses and watching soccer on TV, which turned out to be quite entertaining - not so much the soccer itself, but the commentary. To begin with, it appears that the commentators believe that the word 'gol' should be drawn out for as long as possible (as in 'goooooooool'); a minimum of 30 seconds seems to be an entry requirement for the job. The second thing that surprised me was intonation changes within a sentence. I always thought that intonation can do only one of two things at the end of an exclamation or a sentence - the voice can either go up or go down. Boy, was I wrong - these guys sound like they are warming up for some serious opera singing. After holding the note for the mandatory 30 seconds, they start their voice exercises - a little higher, a little lower, a bit of tremolo (if that's the term), a few syncopated bits, a bit of throaty jazz vocal - absolutely amazing. The first time I heard it I thought the guy suddenly went off his rocker, but apparently this is considered normal in this country.

Road rules

Even though I have spent almost two months in Argentina I have not quite figured out how to cross road intersections. The way they work in Argentina appears to be a mixture of the American (give way to the right) and Indian (give way to the cows and everything that's bigger than you) systems. I just cannot understand when one follows rules, and when one ignores them. The only relatively safe way of crossing a road on foot I figured out is to run across an intersection using a passing bus as a shield against traffic. The method has two drawbacks though. One is that waiting for a passing bus on every intersection makes walking through the city rather slow; the other is that the bus may actually be turning rather than passing (without indicating, of course), threatening to splatter you on the pavement. The intersections are not covered in the mangled bodies of the elderly and children though, so I am sure there must be a better way of doing things - I just have not discovered it.

Parrilla in Cordoba

I have discovered that one of Cordoba's claims to fame is the biggest all-you-can-eat parrilla (barbeque) restaurant in Argentina, so I went there to sample the goods. The place was rather amazing. Two walls of its giant two-storey hall were occupied by a buffet that stretched for 110 metres (I actually marched along the whole length of it to measure). As far as I could tell, not a single dish along those 110 metres was repeated. The other wall was covered by the actual parrilla, or rather a number of them - an Argentinean one, smoked meats, Chinese-style woks, stoves for hot deserts, and something else. I was not sure I was quite up to the challenge of the place, but I decided to give it a try. After forty minutes or so of intense grazing I reached a 30-metre mark of the buffet and realized that there was absolutely no chance of finishing the whole course. Given that the place was, after all, a parrilla, I decided to abandon this long-distance eating and to move to the parrilla wall to sample the meats while I still had a bit of room left. There things promptly got out of control. I asked for some barbequed ribs; the guy cooking them went to the parrilla and came back with a piece of carcass of such ludicrous size that the word "big" would actually be a misleading description - it was in a totally different class from big. My stunned expression and a request to get something a bit smaller, like maybe 1/4 of the piece, earned me a "so what are you doing here in the first place" look and a slab of meat that would still be advertised as "food for two people for the price of one" in Australia. I spent close to two hours there (the second hour mostly reading up on the next leg on the trip rather than eating ;-), and that seemed to be the average time other people spent there - except that they did not waste their time on books. After seeing this palace of mass gluttony, the buffets of Las Vegas will forever look like little mom-and-pop operations to me!

For about two days following the visit to this culinary wonder I was concerned that the experience was going to kill me; the thought that sustained me during those days was that if I was destined to end my life in Cordoba, I would do so a well-fed man.