The Wonder of La Mezquita

If ever a place on earth can truly convey the concept of infinity, La Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain comes closest. This huge mosque was the jewel of Western Islam from the late 700's when it's construction was begun by the Caliph Abd Al-Rahman when he assumed rule over Moorish Spain in Cordoba until 1236 when the Christian King Ferdinand III conquered Cordoba and reclaimed the city for Christian Spain. It is truly an amazing building and beyond inspiring! Even with the changes to it brought by the Catholic Christians (closing off many of the entrances, especially those that led in from the Courtyard of Orange Trees, by the construction of private family chapels by those wishing to be buried within the walls of what became a Christian house of worship, along with the building of a giant cathedral right in the middle of the mosque) it is still a wonder to behold. There is nothing else I have ever experienced which has conveyed such a sense of wonder and mystery.

With its sea of columns in muted shades of rose and blue, a ceiling that is only 30 feet high, yet broken up by double arches of red brick and white stone so that it feels even lower, and simple floors of stone or brick it conveys a sense of the embracing, sheltering presence of God. It is the complete opposite of everything a cathedral attempts to communicate. Cathedrals stretch upward, striving to reach heaven, extending the gaze upward toward a distant God. Cathedrals want to remind us of the majesty, wonder, awesome might, grandeur, and power of a God who is both Creator and Sovereign, Ruler and Judge over the Universe.

That is not the sort of place where I worship at home. It is not the type of place which draws me closer to God and evokes within me a sense of God's presence and love. I can be moved by the awe-inspiring works of God in the world - Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, mountains rising to the skies, plains and oceans stretching to the horizon - but it is in the quite times in my own closet, the serene times in a forest glade or by a mountain stream, in the small chapels and simple churches where I am most aware that God is with me. It is in these close, intimate, womb-like spaces where I receive the assurance again that I am beloved by God, that I am not alone in this huge, often cold and impersonal world, but God is watching over me, protecting me, and embracing me in love.

La Mezquita in Cordoba embodies that for me.

Surprises and connections realized in Madrid

Rising above the city of Madrid, overlooking the Royal Palace and the Cathedral, we discovered Egypt in the middle of Spain! In 1968 the Egyptian government made a gift to the Spanish government for their help in rescuing monuments that had been threatened by the rising Nile waters above the Aswan Dam. What a gift! They bestowed upon the city of Madrid and entire Egyptian Temple first erected about 200 B.C.

What an experience, walking the rooms of Templo de Debod felt as though we had suddenly shifted our trip from the hills of Madrid to the banks of the Nile River. The temple was erected to honor the gods Amun and Isis and including side chapels for Osiris and Horus and others. The temple was actually expanded by Emperors Julius & Augustus Caesar after they had conquered and made trips to Egypt. How wild to think: yesterday we walked streets where Romans had walked, followed by Visigoths (who ruled Toledo and most of Spain after Rome fell), as well as many of the earliest monarchs of the Spanish empire, and even Miquel de Cervantes; and now today we walked on stones where the feet of priests and Pharaohs had walked as well as Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus! What connections we are making with our physical presence in this ancient and amazing land.

After the Egyptian Temple we entered the massive halls built as a temple to human pride, vanity, and obscene wealth and power as we walked through the second floor of the Royal Palace (Palacio Real). The third largest palace in Europe, after Versailles and Vienna's Schonbrunn, the similarities to Versailles are everywhere evident. That should not be surprising since the palace was commissioned in the 18th century by King Philip V. Though he ruled Spain for 40 years, he was very French. (The grandson of Louis XIV, he was born in Versailles and preferred speaking French.) His wife was originally from Italy and her influence is very evident as well, especially in many of the interior frescoes, ceilings, and other decorative flourishes. The palace is huge, with more than 2,000 rooms and though you only tour 24 in the public tour that is more than enough opulence and over-the-top wealth to convey the majesty and power of the Spanish royalty.

While the current King & Queen do not reside in the Palace, living in a mansion a few miles away, this place still functions as a royal palace, and is used for formal state receptions, royal weddings and funerals, and special state occasions (such as when Spain officially joined the European Union the signing ceremony took place in the Hall of Columns.) We walked on the Grand Stair up which all guests walk when arriving for state functions. We cannot remember, but I am sure we trod the same steps some of our Presidents have walked, possible President Bush and First Lady Laura, or President Clinton and First Lady Hilary. Again, it was a day for realizing connections with many, many people are much closer than we usually realize as we live day to day.

A day for exercising the body & the spirit

A walled city where none of the streets are level, they either go up or down, not too steep, but definitely make walking interesting, especially since they are also cobblestone and extremely narrow. God forbid you meet a car coming or going. I actually had the zipper on my jacket clipped by the passenger-side mirror of a fairly quickly moving vehicle as I tried to edge around a corner that interrupted what little sidewalk was present, thus forcing you into the street. Too close a call for me!

Welcome to Toledo! It is a city with 2,500 years of history and somewhat frozen in time about 700 years ago. In fact the city is so well preserved it has been declared a national monument. The ENTIRE CITY! And the Spanish government has forbidden any modern exteriors. (Of course like any government, I guess they are exempt for the new entry they added to the Alcazar when they renovated it into a national military museum is extremely modern. It totally clashes with the rest of the building and the entire city!)

We spent a marvelous day wandering the streets of Toledo (which is exactly what you do. Even with the Guide Maps it is nearly impossible NOT to get lost. At some point it seems every tourist does so, some multiple times, or they just give in and wander and take what the city provides, which is actually a treasure around every bend or corner in the maze of streets.) For a city whose life-blood is tourism, the signage to assist visitors in getting around is extremely poor. You will start down one direction because a sign designates that way to the Mezquita, for example, and then you never see another sign the rest of the walk. Yet along the way there are multiple forks in the road and you enter numerous small plazas with numerous entrances and exits. I have had a far easier time navigating the lakes and streams of the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area in northern Minnesota than I did navigating Toledo.

Perhaps it is actually designed as a tremendous spiritual exercise?! After all, it is a walled city. Three sides are bounded by the Tajo River. It is set on top of a hill. So you really cannot get "lost" but will always bump into an edge with an option to head back toward the center. It becomes a problem if you are a goal-oriented, accomplishment-driven American who feels you must see "all" of the sights, or at least a major portion of them. So this spiritual exercise of the streets of Toledo will either drive you mad, or it will begin to break through your "expectations" of what must be achieved and experienced and begin to lead you to slow down, grow patient, go with the flow and simply experience what the city, what life, has to open up before you and, if you slow down enough to look for it, surprise you with.

We did see some of the sights: the Cathedral (huge, immense, awe-inspiring, although after a little while inside, it actually began to feel "oppressive" for Dianne), the Synagogue which houses the National Jewish Museum, a second synagogue which was once a mosque, a Christian church, and for a while served as the stables for Napoleon's horses, and the Mezquita, a very ancient ruined mosque which also was once a Christian church and has some remaining Christian frescoes on the ceiling and the walls.

But we also enjoyed a delicious and slow-paced lunch at a little restaurant where the inside was packed with locals and the outside tables filled with tourists from Germany, Italy, USA, and several other places. We ordered the Menu de Dia (a three course meal). We each had the traditional Catalan Soup; Dianne had a veal steak that looked exactly like a Palomilla and I had venison stew (Toledo is known for its wild game options for dining). It was all washed down with a cheap bottle of Red Table Wine and topped off with flan. It was good and the afternoon sun warm and enjoyable and a nice respite in the middle of the day.

We also enjoyed a surprising invitation immediately after arriving and walking up the hill to the Cathedral, by a very friendly man who told us all about a little shop of artisans just 2 minutes away where we could watch them working, for free! We decided to accept his invitation, since it was only open until noon and it was already 10:30 a.m. He walked us down the hill about two blocks to a charming little shop in a back-alley where we were introduced to two gentlemen working on gold damascene jewelry. We then entered their shop and of course purchased some very nice quality craft work from craftsmen who have been plying their trade for 25, 30, and 48 years! It was a pleasant surprise!

Toledo was a good experience at just the right time. It invited us to slow down and soak in the location, rather than keep driving to achieve all the notches we could count on our traveler's staff. After today I feel we are beginning to find that balance we wanted to achieve between sight-seeing and simply living in and soaking up the surrounding culture and environment which is Spain.

Amazing Art & Food in Madrid

El Prado is a museum to rival the Louvre, the Uffizi in Florence, the Art Institute in Chicago and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art. We spent six hours tracing the evolving career of Goya, from a hired artist for the Royal Court, to an artist who made political statements, to a disturbed man painting his darkest nightmares after living through the horror of the War for Independence from Napoleon, and then viewing the works of Vasquez, El Greco, Ribera, Titian, Fra Angelico, Raphael, & others. Dianne "discovered" a Mona Lisa anonymous knock-off that looked every bit as good as the more famous portrait. It is clearly the same model in the same pose without the landscape background and from the same time period as Da Vinci's painting. There were surprises around ever corner.

But, as amazing as the art museum was, what I really want to share with you today is about the food of Madrid. We embarked on our first "Tapas Crawl" this past evening. This is a Madrileno custom where friends travel from one pub/restaurant to another, drinking wine/beer and eating tapas (basically a Spanish appetizer). At each stop they usually get a plate or assortment to share, or just small individual servings called "pinchos." Anyway, if you are a Madrileno (that is a native to the town) and know where you are going without needing to scope the establishments out and try to size them up, and you are with a group of friends, it sounds as if it could be a fun evening. But as a couple of tourists unsure of the language, the food, and the pubs/restaurants it was actually a somewhat daunting endeavor.

The first place we stopped was a vinoteca (a wine bar) where we had a delicious Rueda Verdejo (a white wine). But, though they had a tapas menu on the table, the waiter did not return to take our order. We did not see anyone else eating in the place, so we assumed perhaps the kitchen was closed (they were advertising on the door for "help") but when we went to leave I asked the waiter if there were "no tapas" tonight and he look rather flustered as though he had missed a sale. We then checked out several more places, all of which either seemed over-priced or what I could understand of what was offered I wasn't sure I wanted to eat. We finally got off the beaten path and discovered a wonderful little neighborhood place: La Tia Cebolla Taberna (Auntie Onion's Tavern). While it appeared rather rough around the edges we dove in. The wait staff was very helpful and we enjoyed a free offering with our vino rioja (red wine) of fruti del mar (a seafood salad, which included octopus slices). This beginning was good, so we proceeded to order and then enjoyed a lovely salmon & brie on toast and the house specialty a Don Paco, which was a hot open faced sandwich of toast, tomato slices, ham, covered with melted manchego cheese, flavored with pimiento powder & basil flakes. Both were very healthy servings and were wonderful. They filled us up so our crawl basically ended there (I don't imagine a true Madrileno would end the evening after just two stops!) except for the cafe we stopped for a hotel/bar near our own hotel. I am not sure we are fans of the Tapas Crawl, but we have experienced it!

The Spanish diet is heavy on meat (much like Argentina) except that this time it is weighted toward pork rather than beef. That is very clear when you visit the Museo de Jamon (yes, that is the Museum of Ham!) This deli/restaurant is a Temple to Ham, with large leg portions of pigs hanging from the rafters and almost everything on the menu incorporating some type of pig: ham plates, ham sandwiches, chorizo sausage, etc. This is mostly a dried, salted, type of ham which is much closer to prosciutto than to our ham steaks or spiral cut hams in the US.

Overall, we have found the food very good. We had a most exquisite gourmet dinner our first evening here. We started with mushroom croquettes, followed by two cuts of veal which were wonderfully prepared, and ended with a cheesecake dessert which was basically a form of upside-down cheesecake in a bowl topped with a delicious cream and berries, along with cafe espresso para mi y cappuccino para Dianne. The owner, waiter, and chef were all very young and most attentive. It was a wonderful introduction to Spanish cooking. I fear we will not lose any weight on this vacation!

Madrid is very familiar!

It feels like coming home! Arriving in Madrid and I feel as though I know this place! The architecture, the busy streets, the clothing the people are wearing, all feel very familiar. I even know where to look on the sides of the buildings at the corners about 10 feet up from the street to find the street sign to be able to identify the streets and know where I am! Madrid feels exactly like Buenos Aires! The sound of Spanish fills the air and mi Espanol es vuelve!

Walking the streets yesterday with Dianne had the same feel as walking the streets in Buenos Aires. Except, cleaner! No dog poop on the sidewalks! We have seen fewer dogs being walked than in Argentina, although one group did bring a HUGE Harlequin Great Dane (beautiful dog) into the restaurant last night as they sat at a corner table and had their drinks and tapas. The dog was amazingly well behaved and after it settled down in the corner you barely knew it was there.

It really should not have surprised me that Madrid would feel so much like Buenos Aires. After all, BA was founded and settled and created by people from Spain! It is that old colonial attitude still lurking in my brain that whatever we have in the New World (the Americas) is truly new and unique, forgetting that our ancestors arrived from Europe (most of them) and it was their culture which they brought with them. The connections are clearly here in Spain to see and it is one of those reasons I like to travel: to be reminded of our connections with the people of the past and our relationships at a DNA level with people all over the world.

I am posting a few pictures to illustrate what Madrid feels and looks like. In a future post I will add a link to more pictures. Buen dia!