2-1-07 Cordoba

Hola! It’s me again. Well Cordoba was fabulous, while it was not the biggest city, it certainly has been the most enjoyable so far. Cordoba is famous for the Mezquita, the city’s former mosque. The mosque was actually converted into a cathedral in the 1200’s, and is just plain amazing. There is a courtyard with a grove of orange trees and then the hypostyle hall, a grid of columns for you non-architecture people. The Christian interventions are rather depressing but at least they left the hypostyle alone.

So anyway our hostel was really nice, it was in a main plaza, called Plaza de la Tendillas. There were some interesting photos inside of what the plaza used to look like a few years ago, when it was covered with asphalt and did not look to dissimilar from things you would expect to see in America. Recently they have ripped up all of the asphalt and replaced with some nice big square pavers and added a couple of water features. Now the plaza is filled with sidewalk cafes and restaurants. The area around the plaza is a big shopping area, the main of which is called Gran Capitan. Gran Capitan it self was interesting in that it had all of its asphalt replaced too, and so the entire space felt continuous even though cars were allowed on the outside edges and the middle was relegated to pedestrians and a series of head sculptures.

On the first day we went to the Mezquita, awesome just awesome, and then walked down to the nearby river area, where we saw the old roman bridge, which was under construction unfortunately, and series of Arabic water mills that leapfrogged across the river. On the way home we walked by the remnants of the old city walls, and then along the major north-south street, Paseo de la Victoria. The street was interesting because it was divided by a huge green strip, which had things like an elementary school, a student driving course, an auditorium, and a series of parks embedded in it. That evening we went out walking looking for food, and then proceeded to get ourselves lost… fun! Eventually we made it home and passed out.

The second day we walked to a cool shopping courtyard, which had tons of shops and a market along the sides and then several floors of patio apartments above them. We had seen a postcard of the space when it was filled with a huge outdoor market…. Well I guess it is just too cold or the wrong day, because there was no market…although there was a nifty rodeo-like setup, yee-haw! The rest of the day we wandered, had a café… shopped, had a café… ate, had a café… you know we lived like Italians.

Well know we are on another train ride, this is filled with olive groves and sheep farms. It is so much fun to ride through the countryside as opposed to fly over it, it really gives you a good feel for the different scales of European life, and not just the metropolitan. On to Valencia and hopefully it is just as warm as Cordoba was… if not warmer.