August 19, 2004
CORDOBA -- Yet another one of these big-small Andalucian cities, Cordoba consists of a very very compact historical center, which tourists rarely bring themselves to leave, and a very modern European city and suburbs surrounding it. I got a good look at the modern downtown area during my walk to the hostel from the bus station. A wide boulevard with a public garden in the center runs north-south between the stations and the old city, lined mostly with boutiques, restaurants, and travel agencies. Traffic zips by as fountains burble peacefully. After about 15 minutes of walking, I passed through the gate in the old city walls, and things changed dramatically. The streets went from asphalt to cobblestone, from a grid to a tangle, and from four lanes to slightly less than one. Some of the hotels in the old city offer their guests parking, and the guests stubbornly try to use it. I met a normal-sized sedan going the other way on one of these streets. I had to stand in a doorway to get past. A bicyclist came up, and decided it was impossible for him to get his bike by.
The hostel, while HI (the international, somewhat cookie-cutter chain), was quite nice, and with a killer location, no more than 2 minutes' walk from the main sights in the old city. The reception was having some "trouble" with my room, which I assume meant that someone overslept checkout, so I was sent off to get myself some lunch. Arriving yet again during the siesta, I settled on a bar not too far from the hostel where I got a chorizo bocadillo (see discussion of sandwiches earlier). I also did some restaurant recon with an eye towards dinner, having nothing better to do for an hour. Returning to the hostel, I got checked in and found my roommates sound asleep. By the time I had done laundry they were awake, introducing themselves as very friendly Argentinians. I asked them what they thought of the Castilian accent, and they said they liked it; what's more, the Castilians seemed to think the Argentinian accent was "cute". I feel it's much the same situation as with American and British English. In fact, now that I think of it, I talked to one of the Dutch girls in Atrani about her experience in South Africa, and what she thought of Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect spoken there. She said it sounded like "young children learning to speak". Perhaps there's a sense of older/younger, and aristocratic/cute, with all of the European languages and their colonial offshoots (though the French seem to have more of an outright disdain for Quebecois).
While the Argentinians went off to meet a friend of theirs, I took a bit of a walk around the area, and concluded that the old center is very small, as I've mentioned. I crossed the old Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir River, which I'm told is the "most navigable" in all of Spain. It was suprisingly wide and fast, especially for August, which I thought was the dry season. I peered across the water to some old "Muslim mills" sitting on small islands, but couldn't see any way to get to them short of swimming, so I returned to the hostel in search of a dinner companion. The Argentinians were still out, but the fourth roommate had arrived: a friendly South-African/Israeli physics student whose name is possibly spelled Mahos. We went to a local restaurant and I took the menú, which was cold chickpea soup and fried calamari rings. The Spanish do love their squid, it seems. We split a pitcher of sangria and lingered over our dinner for about two and a half hours. We went afterwards to a plaza that the Argentinians had mentioned as a good spot for nightlife, but this turned out to be wrong: the sidewalk bars and cafes, which probably were very pleasant, were shutting down when we arrived around midnight. It being too late for random exploration, we called it quits.
The next day, the main event was the Mezquita, which is Cordoba's most famous attraction. This is essentially a fairly large mosque that has a small cathedral built in the middle of it. The cathedral in Seville is a church built on the site of a mosque that was largely demolished, with a few architectural remnants worked into the design. Cordoba's mosque was left intact, apparently due to the wishes of the citizens -- even the construction of a nave and transept within the mosque walls brought protests at the time. The resulting structure is much more open than a typical cathedral, which usually is cross-shaped and stuffed with statues and pews. Instead, the Mezquita is a roughly square forest of columns supporting striped arches. Chapels line the perimeter and the central altar lies beneath a dome that was added by the Christians, but the mihrab (niche pointing toward Mecca) was left intact, with its surrounding mosaiced arches. Mahos had gone into the Mezquita only about ten minutes ahead of me, but I never saw him there on account of its size.
The tourist sites in old Cordoba all close at around 2:30 in the afternoon, and I didn't feel particularly energetic, so I just walked to the bus station, bought my ticket for the next day's trip to Madrid, and lazed in the cool hostel courtyard with my book. Another brief trip to the grocery store led to dinner. Later that evening, Mahos and I planned to go to the botanical gardens for an "evening of Andalucian music" that he had heard about. While I was lingering over my dinner, I happened to meet two girls who, coincidentally, were students at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (from which Mahos had just graduated), and were planning to go to the same music event, so we all went over together. The evening turned out to be conducted in Spanish, which none of us understood, and featured a lot of storytelling, but it was still good cheap fun, and walking around a botanical garden in the dark is actually more interesting than it sounds (the various smells are a lot more noticeable when you can't see anything). Yet again I acted the part of the strange boring foreigner, and we all went back to the hostel, though I stayed up chatting in the courtyard for another hour before going to bed. I'll be in Madrid for the weekend, so I've resolved to check out the nighttime scene there at least once.