When we last left Brenna, she was in Sevilla. Let's take a look inside her head, shall we? If you dare...
Brenna's Mind: Dum-de-dum. I'm in Spain! I think I need to leave Sevilla now, though. Where should I go? Barcelona? Too far away. The coast? Nah. Lindsay says Segovia is cool, but that is a lot of traveling to take in one day. I could go to Cordoba. What's in Cordoba? I could just go back to Madrid. Or go to Granada and just look at the Alhambra from the outside. But I have hostel reservations for Monday in Madrid, so I should get back there that night. What the hell. I'll go to Cordoba. Got to be something interesting there, right?
I didn't say the inside of my mind was interesting, did I? So, yeah. I went to Cordoba. Which, according to both my sister and my guidebook (they contained a lot of similar information, interestingly) has the 'second best' Islamic mosque in Europe.
This isn't it. This is some other random building I came across while I was horribly, horribly lost. It was the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos, and I mostly paide the 4 euros to enter because it was starting to rain, and I wanted a dry spot to try to figure out where the heck I was. Interestingly, it was donated by Ferdinand and Isabel (yes, THAT Ferdinand and Isabel) to the Inquisition in 1482. Which led to the common school-kid saying in Spain - "In fourteen hundred eighty-two, Ferdinand and Isabel donated the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos to the Spanish Inquisition." It rhymes in Spanish. (obviously I'm totally kidding. It doesn't rhyme).
Think Isabel ever fell down these stairs?
More arches! See how empty this particular tourist location was? I think everyone that was there was like me - lost and trying to escape the rain...
...Because not too far down the road was the Mezquita! Turns out I wasn't as horrifically lost as I had feared. The Mezquita was built on the site of an old, ruined cathedral, and initally used as a mosque. Now, in the olden days in Europe, they appeared to have something of a land crunch. As the various Super-Powers of the time rolled into town, they'd tear down some prime real estate to build their own. Generally church--> mosque --> cathedral --> mosque --> high rise, etc. Maybe it was a power thing, but the _really_ old buildings were generally demolished.
This particular mosque survived the destruction.
With LOTS of arches...
...and dramatic lighting. So how did this mosque survive where others were destroyed? Simple...
...they just built a cathedral in the middle of it. After all, why not?
Cordoba was an interesting town. But it was rainy and I was grumpy, so I went to the train station before dinner to get a train ticket back to Madrid. There are 30 trains a day from Cordoba to Madrid. I got there at 5 pm. ALL of the trains were sold out until 10:45 pm. I sat and watched 7 or 8 trains leave before I did. Granted, I could have gone back into town, but I was grumpy and it was rainy. So I just sat there!
I was going to finish posting pictures today, but my last day was in Toledo, which was the day I took the MOST pictures. So that is going to get a whole separate post.
Now I'm going to go study. Blech.
1 comment:
Ah, Cordoba. The place where we missed our bus, then because it said "tour the great forest" on our schedule, spent a half-hour asking people where "el bosque" was... until finally some local person figured it out and realized that they were using forest to describe the thousands and thousands of columns in the mosque. GAH!
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