With the bus so late I didn’t arrive in Rosario until 7pm. I hate arriving at night as I’d been burnt previously walking around and trying to find a hostel with no
daylight and in need of food. When you’re going from hostel to hostel in the
morning it isn’t so much of a problem as you have the entire day to find a
place to stay, but at night you just want to find somewhere to dump your
backpack secure in the knowledge you have a place to stay the night.

And of course there had to be some event going on in Rosario this weekend. There were tonnes of students here for a week long visual arts festival, and after walking around for 2 hours and being told from three hostels they were full, the last hostel recommended me a place. I hadn’t grabbed a city place from the bus
terminal as I had checked on the Hostel World website for a couple placed and
Google Maps pinpointed their address. Google Maps was wrong and these hostels weren’t where it indicated they were. The last hostel I tried gave me the
cities tourist map, which I was able to use to finally find the hostel I ended
up staying in.

I’m not sure what the deal with this hostel was, but it had a bathtub in the middle of the dorm room. It looked like it was functioning, and when I asked the guy on
reception he told me girls would dance in the tub. I wasn’t sure if girls used
to dance back in some heyday era when this place was a brothel, or whether it
was still an event they put on. Nevertheless, I didn’t see any girls dancing in
the bathtub, which was kind of let down, but there were a lot of random people
sleeping the night and vanishing the next morning.

Rosario really is a beautiful city. The streets are lined with colonial architecture and they have a lengthy pedestrian strip filled with people sitting outside sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. It seems that everyone in Argentina smokes, it’s impossible not to see at least half a dozen people walking along with a cigarette in their hand. It’s a weird thing to see when smoking doesn’t appear to be a thing elsewhere in South America – well except for Chile, everyone smokes there too.

On the Sunday I headed to the cities park and was pleasantly surprised to find the
entire main boulevard closed off to traffic. The wide streets were positively
filled with joggers, people walking their dogs, a bizarre number of
rollerbladers, and small kids riding their bikes. It really is heartwarming to
see something like this, were a city prides itself on allowing it’s locals to
get out and be active instead of catering to the hoards of exhaust belching
cars.  

The park in Rosario would have to be the best green space I’ve seen in Argentina, if not all of South America. A huge space with a lake in the middle, where people line up to use the paddle boats, while others just bask in the sun and watch life go by. Really just a thoroughly pleasant park to take the family for the day and
have a picnic on lush green grass. For lunch I bought an enormous hot dog
topped with ham and cheese (they really like putting ham and cheese on things
here) and just sat soaking in the nature.

The one unpleasant part of nature in Rosario are the mosquitos. They’re absolutely everywhere, and when I headed down to check out the river I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many mosquitos in my life. I mean, even in the Amazon they’re not this bad. I must have had an entire extended family of this horrible little bastards swarming over me, and looking around at others walking along I could see that they weren’t just after me for my sweet foreign blood – there was one jogger that must have had a good thirty mozzies on his back. I quickly decided to retreat back to the hostel and load up on some Aeroguard mozzie replant, but to honest, I think this particular breed are immune because it didn’t help that much.

The single most dominating feature of Rosario is the monument Nacional a la Bandera. It’s a massive monument to General Manual Belgrano, the designer of the Argentinian flag. The site is huge, like jaw droppingly huge. This monolith stands towering over a large concrete plaza that has a distinct Roman design to it. It’s by far the most impressive man-made structure I’ve seen in Argentina. To say it’s an absolutely eye opening piece of craftsmanship in honour of Belgrano would be an understatement. It’s just stunning in its grandeur.

With the weekend past it seemed that I was the only person left in the hostel. While it was fun sitting drinking beers with one of the managers there and both of us speaking Spanglish to one another, I figured it was time to move on and finally hit up Buenos Aires. I still had two and a half weeks in Argentina before
flying out to Colombia, and I felt that was a good amount of time to spend in
the countries capitol.

After an hours walk to the bus terminal (I really don’t know why I just didn’t get a
taxi) I jumped on the next bus to Buenos Aires, on an executive bus
nonetheless, and travelled the 5 hours to the tango epicentre of the world.