Days Nineteen and Twenty - Holy Toledo!

Oh my, Toledo, you have won me over in fantastic ways.

The beginning of the day, though interesting, pales in comparison to the rest of the day. Suffice it to say I took the metro to the bus depot where I bought a round-trip ticket to Toledo.

A little background on Toledo: Toledo is one of the oldest cities in Spain. It was a Roman town, and the Roman capital of a province of Spain. After the fall of Rome it was the capital of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain until that was invaded by Muslims in the 700s; from then on it gained renown as a "city of the three cultures" where Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in relative harmony. That is, of course, until the 1400s when the Christian Spanish kingdom of Castille y Leon took over the area, and then after the unification of Spain towards the end of the 1400s and the subsequent inquisition, all the Muslims and Jews either fled, were converted, or went into hiding. That aside, the city of Toledo served as the capital of Spain for quite a while, and as a result of its long history it has accumulated a *ton* of impressive architecture which I shall reveal.

Toledo is a city that is better experienced visually than textually, I think, or at least the side I saw was that way. Traveling with a group of international students we didn't get the chance to stop in a lot of small shops - we planned to see the big sites and we saw all the important ones:

After climbing the hill from the bus depot, we turned around a saw a view like this.

Notice what you don't see: city. This is a town which, more or less, has stayed the same size for 500 years.

It keeps its tiny streets:
Three people across. And cars drive down these, and it's kinda scary when there's a car coming and there's not really any space to get off the road. Luckily they go about 3 miles per hour.

The heart of the city is dominated by a gargantuan cathedral:


And at one point we went in a little church to the north:


which had some enormously tall church towers which, to our surprise, we were able to go up. From the top, we were able to look back over the fantastic city:
The tall tower is, of course, the cathedral, as is that little dome a little to the right. You can see the rest of it stretching really quite far back.

From another angle:
The large building on the left is the military history museum as well as the city archive/library, and I heard in retrospect that it was built on what was originally a Roman building.

Moving on from that building we ate at a tiny restaurant in a back alley. Well, it was as small as a back alley, but compared to some of the other streets, it could have been a major thoroughfare. I got a dish of cheese-stuffed red peppers with roquefort-covered romaine lettuce hearts and a sort of pepper salad; it was fantastic.

Moving on we went to the western wall of the city:


It's Roman.

For some two thousand years this wall has stood here. Roman, Goth, Moor and European have stood sentry over these walls. And it makes sense - Toledo is on a hill virtually surrounded by a river and then huge, wide plains. It is an amazingly perfect fortification, and it has been used as such since before we can even imagine. Some of the wall had graffiti on it which made me very sad. But then again, some of the walls had age-old Arabic engraved on them. And thousands of years ago, Romans probably graffitied these walls themselves. This city is layers upon layers of history and people and culture.

Passing once more into the city we tried to go by a Mudéjar statue of Jesus called Cristo de la Vega. Mudéjar is a word which refers to the Muslims who remained in Spain after the reconquest but who did not convert to Christianty - thus the statue was a Muslim statue of Jesus.


What many people don't know is that Muslims, too, hold a high regard for Jesus and revere him as a prophet and holy man, though not worshiping him as the son of God. However, there is the much more stringent Muslim prescription against graven images, so I'm not sure if Mudéjar were more lax on the idol thing than other Muslims or whether it was just a Christian statue done in Moorish style.

After that we walked around a bit more, seeing the Judería - the ancient Jewish quarter - and an old synagogue, but unfortunately my camera was running somewhat low on batteries at about this time so I had to keep my photography to a minimum. I plan to go back at some point, as the ride is only about E5 each way.

About this time, I parted from my Erasmus friends and met up with my coworkers who had come late. We first went to a bar and got three Gin and Tonics to end all others - One raspberry, one rose, one tropical fruit. The care and detail in their preparation were so lavish that they were about ten minutes in the making. Raspberries were individually crushed, rose water was spritzed in, mint leaves were rolled up into a rose shape. And I must admit, the taste did indeed merit the length of preparation.

Our drinks imbibed, we made our way to a nearby "Muslim Cave" museum, which was once a place where Muslims worshipped in secret after the Christian reconquest. But here's the cool thing: their secret hiding place was an old Roman basement. This, like the wall, was another piece of evidence that this city was a literal mountain of history and culture of untold and ancient scale.

One of my coworkers, Abbey, had actually lived in Toledo a year ago, and as such she knew all of the awesome places to go. First we were off to an "Irish" bar where we got some cider, then to a vegetarian restaurant. Pizza Arabbiata, soup made out of spinach, piñon nuts and raisins (actually quite common; I've seen it everywhere and it's absolutely delicious). And then after eating we realized that it was too late to catch the 10:30 bus home, so we sought lodging for the night.

Where did we go? The place where Abbey had lived last year - part dorms, part hostel, but very cheap and perfectly fine for a mere place to stay for the night. Our lodging secured, we headed out to the Explorer's club (a club decked with jeeps, sabertooth tigers, dinosaurs, and Egyptian statues), where we passed the rest of our evening.

The morning came with free breakfast in the dorm thing, followed by our bus ride home. And that's the story of Toledo.