Chaska in South America

Matt and I went to Rosario last weekend. We went with my friend Carina, who is originally from there, and we stayed at her mom’s house. Rosario is Argentina’s third largest city, but it only has a population of about a million. That can really tell you how small the rest of the cities in Argentina are! We only went for two days, but that was plenty of time to see all of the city. Rosario is not really much of a tourist destination, so there really isn’t that much to do there, but it was really nice to get out of Buenos Aires for a weekend and see another city. Carina was going because her niece was getting baptized, so Matt and I spent the first day on our own walking around, sigtseeing, and just enjoying being somewhere a lot smaller and more quiet than Buenos Aires. Rosario is located along the Parana River, which is quite large. There are beaches along the river at one point, and we went and spent the day on the beach on Sunday, even though it was a little cloudy and rainy. On Saturday night there was a huge international festival, called El Festival de los Colectividades. It was a festival for all the different nationalities that have immigrated to Argentina…there were a TON of different countries represented from everywhere in the world…Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Croatia, Iran, Lebanon, just to name a few. Matt and I spent the evening there and ate a bunch of good food and watched some shows that each represented country put on.
This weekend I think Matt and I will try to take a trip to Uruguay. It only takes a couple hours by boat to get there and you can easily go there and come back in even just one day. We have a couple different options as far as cities to visit, but I think we’re going to visit a small city called Colonia which is supposed to be really cute. We’ve been thinking about where we’ll go the first week in December, which will be our last week in Argentina, and I think we’ve decided to go south to San Martin de Los Andes and Bariloche. They are located in the mountains and are supposed to be just beautiful…if any of you saw the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, both places are shown in it. Well, here are some pictures from our trip to Rosario. I hope you are all doing well!

This is a huge monument called the Monument of the Flag or something like that. It’s pretty cool and is pretty much the main attraction in Rosario…Matt and I feel really pathetic about how many pictures we took of this stupid thing. I won’t bore you with all of them! There is a park just in front of the monument and that’s where the international festival was held.

These are just a couple other shots of the monument. You can see that the river is just beyond it.

This is a picture of the city of Rosario taken just in front of the river.

This is the Parana River. There are islands across from the city on the other side of the river that you can see. I guess you can take a boat over to them and there are some really nice little beaches, but we didn’t get a chance to do that.

A guy fishing on the shore of the river.

There were these beautiful jacaranda trees all over the city. Matt and I took a nap in this park Saturday afternoon…it was great!

One claim to fame for Rosario is that Che Guevara was born there. This is the door of the apartment building where his family lived when he was born.

These are the two widows that belong to the actual apartment where Che and his family lived. They only lived there for a very short while before moving to another city. The apartment building is still just normal apartments, and as far as I now, there is someone living in Che’s apartment…there wasn’t a plaque or anything, so we just got all this information from the guy working in a little store across the street.

These are some pictures of the little beaches that are located on the Parana River.

Carina and I sitting in front of the beach.

Matt and Carina hanging out on the beach. There were a ton of families having picnics and stuff there that day. It was kind of cool because it really felt like Matt and I were the only tourists.

These guys walked past us, and I just had to take a picture!

Before going to the beach Sunday, we had breakfast at a cafe on the river. This is the most typical Argentinian breakfast…cafe con leche, medialunas, and jugo de naranja.

Tags: Travel

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