Friends, I'm trying really hard to upload a few photos but as best as i can tell to do that from my phone I need to download a new google app and sign away my rights to google--which most of you know i am not going to do. So alas, i guess i'll have to substitute a thousand words. Also, i realized i am still not sure if i am in seville or sevilla (spelling is hard) and have not bothered to check in the last 5 days.
Yesterday the girls and i took a bus to Jerez--the home of sherry (apparently the town used to be called Sheriz or something and the English liked it). We toured the Sandeman bodega (aka winery) where i learned more than i realized there was to know about Sherry (ask me some time and i'll relate the lesson). The tour was awesome--our guide Alicia ('Alithia' with the Andalucian lisp) wore a cape and a hat, no joke, to mimic the logo of the winery. Since it was january we were the only 3 people on the tour that was clearly meant to accomodate 30-40 tourists. It was pretty fun tho and at the end we tasted three different sherries--fino, medium and oloroso. The thing was that since we had raced from the train to the bodega to catch the tour at noon we had not eaten in hours and we were poured three full sherry glasses of 15%, 15.5%, and 17% alcohol (exactly, those numbers are apparently very important) so we got pretty drunk... By the end we were three giggling Americans trying on capes and hats while buying out the gift shop. Then we got lunch (at a place called "pastaghetti", looking back i think that was a drunk choice) and we ordered more sherry....let's just say we slept VERY soundly on the train home.
The next day (today) we caught a bus to Cordoba to see la Mezquita--the big beautiful mosque that christian kings built a church in the middle of (and have since carefully justified by filling all of the brochures with details about how before there was a mosque at that site there was an even older church...lol). It was the strangest thing to see a gothic domed church in the middle of a columned mosque. It was like two different worlds (and worldviews, i suppose) colliding. The mosque space was filled with double-arched columns and the mihrab had verses from the koran spelled out in tiny gold tiles and colored glass. The cathedral (which again was not separate from the mosque--in the middle of the space the columns suddenly gave way to gothic arches) was full of light and soaring ceilings. In too short a word, it was neat!
Side story: i wasn't feeling very well today so i ate little breakfast and was ready to try food carefully at lunch. We had a great experience with a previous menu of the day meal so we decided to try that again. I ordered the non-veg option and was greeted by a large plate of deep-fried sardines. Yum, what else could one want on a queasy stomach? Needless to say, i didn't really manage to eat lunch either.
The last place we went in Cordoba was the alcazar de los reyes christianos (fortress of the christian kings). According to our Rick Steves guidebook, it wasn't great but was supposed to be free on wednesdays. Alas, it was not free and i had to stop myself from arguing, "but Rick says..." The fortress did have beautiful gardens that they apparently rent out for weddings. I don't know that I'd get married there, however, as it is the castle that was donated to the spanish inquisition in the 1400s and countless "false converts" "confessed" after spending time in those towers. (On a lighter note, in preparation for our journey i made the gals watch Mel Brooks' inquisition song and dance number on youtube in preparation for our visit)
We ended our tour of cordoba with a nod to the third great Abrahamic religion via a quick visit to a synagogue that survived the expulsion of the jews from Spain in 1492 by being converted to a church and hospital for people with rabies (guess there were a lot of those patients?). The hebrew carvings were discovered behind the plaster walls during building repair in the 1880s and Spain, regretting it's super anti-semitic past, ordered the building restored. It was tiny but pretty cool (and really made me reflect on the fate of spanish sephardim--pretty f***ed up).
Tonight we went back to the terrifying tapas bar with the angry waiter and i finally got some iberian ham. We couldn't stop giggling at how angry the waiter looked at all of the tourists who came in (a fair number of them as we had dinner at the ridiculously early hour of 9pm when the bar is less intimidating). We realized as we were leaving that our behavior (pointing at the waiter, whispering and laughing, stammering whenever we had to speak to him) probably made it look like we thought he was cute. This only made us laugh harder! If only he knew that we spent half the evening postulating that he had bilateral bell's palsy that made it impossible for him to smile...
Tomorrow we head to Granada--the last stronghold of the moors where hopefully we find out that Sarah's spanish was good enough to correctly buy tickets for the Alhambra online a month ago.
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