Cordoba, Carmona, and Sevilla

[April 17-19]

Driving along in El Torito, we arrived in Cordoba in time to see the famous Mezquita (mosque), which is now a cathedral. First, we had to drive around in circles and I ended up going the wrong way down a narrow one way and had to do some tricky driving to finally find a choice parking spot. We walked inside the Mezquita's tree-filled courtyard, we loved the sweet smell of orange blossoms and the sound of the fountain. And for once, it was actually warm, so it was a great feeling.



The inside of the mosque was a strange combination of Moorish architecture and Christian images. I felt as if I was in a Hindu temple and shouldn't be wearing shoes. It was quite large and empty inside, which made it fun to wander around and take pictures. At night, Dean took this picture of the Mezquita from an old Roman bridge near the ciy center.

In the morning, we left town early and headed to Sevilla. Since we were driving, we decided to make the most of the car and stop wherever we wanted. So we spotted Carmona, a small white town perched on a hill above the highway. Here, the streets were really narrow and empty, so we had fun driving around on the maze of cobblestone streets before stopping to walk around. I particularly loved the flowering windows and took several pictures here.



What was going to be a 30 minute break turned into 3 hours. First, we had a nice tapas lunch, then wandered around on the streets, and then decided to visit the Roman Necropolis. It was a cool outdoor display of the underground crematories and decaying burial sites.

We tried to leave the city and drove around in circles before finding the highway again. Sevilla was only a half hour away and we only had to do two illegal u-turns before finding a parking lot. By the time we moved our bags to a hotel, it was too late to see the cathedral, and we weren't too excited to go anyway since it had a steep entrance fee of around $12 US. I think we are jaded from seeing too many cathedrals already. So we ate ice cream and Dean took this nice photo from outside.



After we walked through the town, we headed to the pleasant Maria-Luisa park and then down to the river. Here, we walked by a game of kayak water polo, quite interesting to watch. A small court kept the kayakers in a rectangular area with two baskets on either side. They were quite aggressive paddlers and would throw the ball to their teammates before the opposition rammed them with their boat.

That night we tried to find a cheap dinner and ended up with a very expensive meal due to our lack in Spanish speaking skills. We thought that we had cancelled one order of shrimp and switched to a different kind of shrimp, but instead got 2 huge portions of these "gambinas." It was so much shrimp for two people to eat, and it wasn't the only dish that we had ordered. A $60 mistake and we haven't had shrimp since then! [Dean: In India, we might have just shrugged off the uneaten food, but in Spain, where we spent significantly more money on the meal, we had to eat every last bite. By the end, it was pretty gross.]

The next morning we ditched our plans to visit the cathedral and decided to just take off and start driving south to Jerez.