Hotel Scala La Falda

... in a room saturated with cigarette smoke. It felt like the opening scene of Apocalypse Now.
The sickness I could handle. I knew that was only going to be a 48 hour thing.
What I couldn't handle was the hostel full of Israelis dancing, singing, drinking, shouting, fighting, ****ing, smoking and being general pricks until 4am in the morning.
I'd finally dozed off only to be awoken at 4:30am by foreign music.
With bulging red eyes and foaming mouth I stormed out of bed ...

... there are some very nice places to go to on day or week-end trips.

Cost of living is very low, maybe 1/3 to half the price of what you would pay in Western Europe, sometimes less. Some examples : €1-2 for a short cab ride; €0.25 for the bus; €2-3 for a movie. Food is also quite cheap.

Finally, as promised, I won´t talk about the weather :-)

... to head straight to Cordoba; It turned out to be a very scenic city by the river, (the sight of the first hoisting of the Argentinian flag, no less) and we met some really cool and amazingly friendly Argentinians, who cooked superb pizzas and got us drunk on soemthing that tasted like Marsh´s lemonade. A great couple of days overall!

We visited the childhood home of photogenic lunatic Che Guevara yesterday, here in Cordoba; a really ...

... would like to be involved on the estancia as much as possible, but with it being winter here ther was relatively little to do. Having said that, there was a fence line that needed removing and renewing, so while Diago tightened the wires and Ali clipped the old ones off, Jon spent the day digging out the old fence posts (this was done Pete Linder style - for anyone who has ever worked at Rednil they will know exactly what that means!). So a ...

... have had to endure on the bus, and at least this time it wasn´t at top volume. I think the bus drivers are just having a laugh. The hostel was really nice, quiet, very small and cramped though. It is a converted tenement apartment in the middle of town. Cordoba is great, really nice feel to it. There are seven universities here and according to LP named the Cultural Capital of the Americas in 2006. There ...

... times before i was understood! So impractical. There was a huge stage so we were waiting for the girl parade to start (like in so many of the clubs over here) but infact it was a dance show. It was actually quite good but over in 10 minutes. There was some really good music but it was all tainted with this dance remix beat they love adding in over here. That evening we had a great ...

... of the walk when we arrived on top of a big canyon from where you could see kilometers away. And the condors. However, they were pretty far away, so they could also have been pigeons. The guide assured us that they were in fact condors and that they are the biggest birds flying. 3 meters across the wings. Today, we are just going to relax, enjoy the city and do some shopping.

My last weekend in Cordoba was pretty chill. Steffi and I hung out all weekend, chilling out mostly. Steffi goes home back to Germany at the beginning of December, but has one week free before she goes, so she is going to come down and visit me in Patagonia for the week. Should be pretty sweet. Stephan wasn't around much since he has found himself a girly ...

... motorcycle with which he travelled through Southamerica. Another trip took us to Villa General Belgrano, a town in the south, where a lot of German, Swiss and Austrian people settled down. It was so funny to see the houses build in the southern German style, a lot of breweries and typical food... so tasty to have Gulasch and Spaetzle for a change, haha. Also, I met up with a cordobes friend of my exboyfriend (who lived here for a while), so she is showing me a bit of the ...

... Laoise and I went out last night. Because we had to check out early today we decided we would try and take it easy and only took out 50 pesos each (about a tenner) to stop us going mad. Yeah right. 5 pesos a cocktail and they drown it in alcohol. A quadruple measure of spirits and mixer for 7.50 pesos. I manage to make it in at 2.30ish whilst that halion Big Bird stayed out with the locals `til god knows what time! We also tried the local ...