Córdoba

Well, this trip happened a while ago, like almost a month ago, and I am just getting around to writing about it now. I hope I can remember everything that happened…

All of the students and a couple of our profesores boarded the bus Friday morning and were off for a beautiful afternoon in the city of Córdoba. After arriving to the city, we donned our wonderful guiri (touristy) head set machines (that I really wish I had a picture of so I could show all of you how silly we look), and headed across the bridge into the town with our professors as our tour guides.

This is the best picture I could find…take note of the blue lanyards around our necks. Connected to those is something that looks like a walkie talkie that you plug your headphones into so you can hear your tour guide. Practical, but you definitely look like a tourist.

Our first stop was at La Catedral de Córdoba (The Cathedral of Córdoba), which was built inside an ancient mosque. There was a ton of sweet architecture on every inch of this building! Even the bathrooms were pretty cool.

El Catedral/Mesquita

sweet arches

Now those are some pipes on that organ!

amazing ceiling work!

 We walked around the Cathedral for a long while and then made our way over to the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos (The castle of the Christian kings). This was also a pretty sweet building with cool old architecture inside, but most of out time here was spent outside walking around the gardens and looking at los baños Arabes (Arabic baths).

my lovely, photogenic friend, Rebecca posing for a picture :)

lovely, photogenic me

Lovely ladies in front of the fountain

After our whole group got to the gardens, we were told that we had roughly 2 hours of free time before we needed to find our way back to the bus. Rebecca and I found a peaceful seat next to the fountains to eat our bocadillos (sack lunches, or “picnics” as they call them here). After the much needed nourishment, we decided that we didn’t really feel like getting lost in the city (we seem to be pretty good at that without even trying), so instead we stayed in the garden area and took a bunch of fun pictures!! Here’s just a few with some fun stories to go with them…

Just chilling by the beautiful fountains

after almost falling in

so this picture needs a little explaining…this pose that I am modeling here is the I-almost-just-fell-into-the-bath pose. You see, I was super excited to take a picture standing in the bath because it was shallow and off to the side, so I wouldn’t get yelled at for going in it. I don’t really think we were supposed to go into them, and I have a good idea why now. You see those darker lines on the bottom of the bath? Yea, those aren’t decorations on the bottom of the bath as I thought they were; as a matter of fact, they are 5 foot drop-offs! Yea. That was a surprise to me. Luckily I had glanced over my shoulder as I was walking backwards to the middle of the bath just in time to notice that it was in fact not a solid surface throughout. I guess I wouldn’t have minded taking a little dip because it was super hot, but then again, I would have probably hit my head on the sharp looking corners, and that would have just been bad news. So maybe, just maybe, there is a reason that people don’t go in these baths :)

my brilliant idea of a tripod for the tripod :)

Rebecca: “Let’s make these plants look like our hair!”
Yea, we’re a little crazy

As if Rebecca isn’t tall enough

Our attempt to imitate the statues

the wonderful lady from America took a picture too…

Another fun story! So Rebecca wanted to imitate these statues, so of course, I said we could use my totally awesome tripod, so I set it up to get everything in the shot and set the timer. My attempt is the one on the left. Not too bad, just a little lopsided. As I was running back and forth from my position to the camera to look at the pictures, some very nice tourists asked us if we wanted them to take the picture for us. My first response was, “No thanks, we got it.” But the lady insisted, so I gave her my camera to take a picture. I forgot to take the timer off of the camera, so she had some troubles using it, but the funniest thing was what she was calling us. She addressed Rebecca (on the right) as “cape girl”  and me (on the left) as “striped shirt girl.” And then she told us to stop laughing for the picture. I don’t know how we were not supposed to laugh. That lady was hilarious. Her picture is the one on the right. I think she missed the memo that we wanted the statues in the picture too. Oh well, this one was better than the ones that she took of the ground or the bushes. Moral of the story: just use the tripod, it seems to work better than older ladies from Canada :)

Overall the trip was good, but pretty quick. I’m just glad Rebecca and I found out way back to the bus, and I didn’t have to ride back soaking wet.

un abrazo,

Melissa