Sep 20

Written by: Maribel Lopez
9/20/2008 7:00 AM

I had a little trouble getting up today…but we were on time for the bus to Cordoba which is good news! I slept the hour and half there and when we arrived, we began our tour of the city at the Alcazar.
The interesting thing about most of Andalusia, which is the “state” or comunidad autonoma that is considered southern Spain, is that it has an extremely rich history. The cities of this area have influence from many different peoples: Romans, Jews, Christians and Muslims and Cordoba specifically still houses a lot of this in it’s ancient buildings and streets.

The Alcazar is a fortified palace that has beautiful gardens and houses history of the Romans from back in the 1300s as well as some Christian roots.

Following the Alcazar, we visited one of the three original synagogs left in Spain, constructed hundreds of years ago. It still has faint inscriptions on the walls as well as an original mural. It was interesting to see that the seating upstairs was for women and the downstairs for men, which in Orthodox Jewish religion, is still seen today.

After the synagog, we walked to La Mezquita or mosque of Cordoba, which has a beautiful garden of orange trees housed inside the fortified walls. To enter La Mezquita, one passes through the “door of the palm trees” (La puerta de Las Palmas). Once inside, there are 850 marble columns that fill the massive structure, forming arches painted of white and red. Some more run down than others; all beautiful. All the altars were gorgeous. Overly decorated with gems, gold and intricate patterns…so much to see…it was all amazing.

We then split for lunch…our senora made us sack lunches so we just ate those and looked around at all the little touristy shops on the itsy-bitsy roads that curl through the city. It was a good trip, I really loved being inside the mosque…it was huge and just amazing to see, but the professors gave us too much free time…at least I thought so.

Slightly hungover, tired and it was about 90 something degrees out and impossible to find shade, I thought I might keel over. But once I got home, I passed out until dinner, then passed out again until 11, got ready and headed out for the city around 12:45…am 

We didn’t get too crazy tonight. We wanted to try this place we’d read/heard about close to our school called Elefunk. Once we got there…total bust. The music was weird and I just got a weird vibe from the crowd, so we headed out toward Calle Betis (naturally) to meet up with Sarah whose cousin was visiting from New York. We hung out at Al Alba, it was pretty hoppin’ tonight, until we decided to trek home.

We walked past where we were the night before (past the botellones) and ironically, we run into a piripi Jose chatting with some friends in the streets. “American girls!” is what he greeted us with and after informing him we were heading home, he was pretty bummed but it was close to 5 at this point and we’d had a long day so we grabbed a cab, that DIDN’T get us lost and were in bed close to 6.

Tomorrow-Market. I’m pumped.

Paz,

Maribel

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