argentina: rosario

we arrived in rosario after an easy bus ride from cordoba...we got easy to read maps from the old lady working the desk in the information office in the bus station, which was quite modern and still under construction...she also told us where we could find a bus to the city centre...
after walking for a bit we found a hostel, and dropped our bags...
rosario isn't filled with specific sights to see, it's more of a relaxing place to go...there is a river through the city, and quite a few restaurants along the river...there are beaches too, so it's probably pretty busy in summer...

rosario is actually one of the birthplaces of argentina...the flag of the country was developed in rosario, and there is a giant monument to guy who made the whole thing...you get a pretty strong feeling of national pride in the city...rosario is technically the hometown of che (though he didn't live there very long at all) and is also the hometown of football superstar lionel messi...
we stopped for ice cream before doing anything else...then we continued walking, looking for someone with whom we could exchange money...that turned out to be rather difficult, we only found one guy, and the rate he offered was nowhere near the current blue market rate...rosario isn't that far from buenos aires, so the excuse of distance didn't fly...

after the money failure, we continued walking...we found a pedestrian street, which was pleasant enough...one of the popcorn vendors had salted popcorn, yahoo!!
eventually we made our way down to the monument/memorial area...lots of people sitting around doing nothing in particular...we also found the eternal flame...
the guidebook mentioned one street in particular as being full of restaurants, so that was where we headed...it took a while to get there, but i don't know how far it was...both of us wanted sushi, but the place we found wasn't going to open for at least 30 minutes...we were both starving, so we found a cafe where we could have a quick snack to tide us over...the sushi was okay...not great, not awful...

i remember being really cold by the time we got back to our hostel, but it probably wasn't that cold...
the next morning i asked if i could buy postcards before we left town...the one place i'd seen postcards being sold was on the pedestrian street, and it didn't seem like it was so far away in my memory...but when we did the walk with our packs, it seemed rather long...especially because it was in the opposite direction of the bus station...
we took a bus to the bus station, and bought tickets for the next bus to buenos aires...easy enough...
unfortunately, our bus broke down at one stop between rosario and buenos aires...everyone piled off the bus and waited...i should say this is what bo and i assumed happened, since we never heard a specific announcement, and my spanish is not nearly good enough to eavesdrop on most conversations...
eventually a new bus came, and took us to a GIANT bus station in buenos aires...