Córdoba, Spain & Puerto Lápice, Spain
This morning, we piled back into the bus and headed to Córdoba. The Mezquita de Córdoba (mosque) is wicked cool, and if you ever get a chance, you should definitely see it. (This, the Alhambra, and the Alcazaba in Málaga are my favorite old buildings thus far.) There’s a huge tower like the giralda in Seville, and a man would climb all the way up five times a day. On a horse. He sounded the trumpet, which was the cue to the people that it was time for minarcle (prayers).
All the doors to the Mezquita are open, but out of respect, people enter only through the main door. Inside is beautiful. The Jardin del Espiritu patio is there, too. The important thing in their religion is that beauty should always be on the inside. The outside can be walls.
Naturally, this beautiful mosque was converted into… you guessed it, a Catholic church. But in a way, I’m glad, since otherwise they would have destroyed it, and that would have been a terrible loss. Going into all these amazing places makes me think about all the places the Catholics did destroy – that’s a lot of history and beauty that we no longer have, but at least we still have some places like this where we can visit, learn about the past, and wonder at the beauty.
Next we went to Puerto Lápice, which has lots of Quixote paraphernalia, but no windmills. So we trekked up to the tops of the tallest hills to see the “giants” made immortal in Cervantes’ famous novel.
That night, both excursions made it back to the dorm, and the girls (and Bryan) all congregated in my room so we could exchange Barcelona/Andalucía stories. Oh, and we sampled some Absinthe from Barcelona. Apparently, the word on the street is that Vincent van Gogh, a little whack already and having downed a tad too much absinthe, cut off his ear in a fit of passion and sent it to his cousin to prove how much he loved her. I was of the opinion that this particular move might have been just a bit too much, but one of my classmates said that any man who would go to such lengths for her really deserved her.
