We started the day with a good breakfast at a bar: cappuccino, water, half toast with butter and plain croissant, topped off by a coffee. The total cost was €7 which is why we are choosing to not eat the €8 (each) breakfast at the hotel, with the crappy coffee and all sorts of food we don’t want.
Our laundry came back, folded and smelling fresh, so we packed up, and took the LAC bus up four stops to the train station.
We boarded and are in coach four, seats 2A and B. It is really comfortable, big seats, lots of room, with bathrooms of course and the dining car is just one car up.
They have coffee for €1,80, wine for €3,00 so not great prices, but not a total rip off either.
We have 2.5 hours to ride, time to work on my blog, edit photos and read.
The train rides so smoothly you feel like you are floating down the tracks, past a rolling, ever changing view.
Quite a fuss at the start, something about the luggage not being stowed away correctly in the oversize bins at the back. The conductors are tsk-tsking and pulling out the tourists one by one to go move their smaller bags to the overhead bins and make room for the bigger suitcases. But, they leave us alone.
This is where it once again really pays off to be traveling with just carry on. We have no problems as our bags are stowed on the shelf directly above us, easy access during the trip.
I am constantly surprised by the beauty of the Spanish countryside. The train is passing through the mountains again, towns, mostly white, backed by high, dry, rocky mountains and cliffs topped by trees, rivers in the valley bottoms. I sure love riding the trains, more than driving, as it is so relaxing, quiet, you get the great view, food, bathrooms and I can do something other than steer.
But, the train stations and schedules don’t always work out, and sometimes it is more efficient to drive. But given a choice: trains every time.
We had to stop about two hours into the trip, at Espera, to change out the axles on the train cars, from Spanish “narrow gauge” size to international size. It was smooth and fast. To see how they do it, watch this video:
The bus driver pointed at the going-the-other-direction stop at the end of the street, where the #3 bus was just pulling away. So we walked over there and waited, and soon we were indeed on the #3 headed to San Fernando.
It was a short walk to our hostal, the Azahar.
What a great little place. It looks shabby and run down from the outside, but it is right next to the Mezquita, cost only €40 for the night, and has the fastest WiFi of the trip. Most impressive, we have three, yes THREE balconies! It is a corner room, so two are in the room and the third is in the bathroom, right next to the toilet. I am gonna use it, baby!
*You will have to look at the photos below to find out if I actually did use the bathroom with the balcony open wide...
We threw the windows wide open just to see the view. It is like living in a room with virtually no walls. Very cool.
It is a hot day, so we went out first thing for cold water, wine and Tapas. The wine bar across the street, Bodegas Mezquita, advertises 40 kinds of wines, 60 kinds of tapas. Or perhaps it is the other way around. At any rate, we figure we could get a good drink and interesting selection of foods there. It was a good choice, especially as the temperature rose to 40° C which is 104°F. Gail had some fried eggplant sticks and I had mushroom croquettes. We had a pretty good red and white wine. I asked for a "robust" red and got one that was a mix of tempranillo, syrah, merlot and cabernet sauvignon. It was only pretty good, but like most of the Spanish wines it had such a faint nose and mild taste that it just did not stand out. Not that it is bad. I am just looking for the one, big and bold wine. So I got a second tapa of batter coated fish, and a glass of the house wine which was just tempranillo and was, surprisingly, better than the other.
So, we have just 37 kinds of wine and 57 tapas left to try.
Then we went out to go see the sight we came to Cordoba for: the Mezquita. The Romans built an early Christian church here around the year 500. About the year 1000 the conquerors turned it into a mosque, which was then turned into a church again in the 1500s.
It is filled with 850 original columns from the year 786.
So the 1000 year old mosque was built on the columns which were recycled into the mosque and now back into the church.
It is an amazing place, probably the best indoor place I have seen. The columns hold arches and double arches, striped red and white. I felt like I was inside of an indoor, stone forest. There are galleys all around the outside edge, graves in the floor, and right in the middle of the building a huge cathedral rises.
Outside there is a walled garden (not impressive) and a high minarete turned into a bell tower which is very impressive. There are like fifteen or twenty gates into the complex, and each gate is very ornate.
The Mezquita is right smack in the middle of the Jewish Quarter, where we walked for a few hours until our bath and massage at the hammam, just down the street at the Arab Baths.
Gail always likes to get a massage, and we wanted to see what a “traditional” hammam was like, so this seemed like a good time. We got the complete package: use of the baths, traditional massage and an extra lather massage on a stone table.
So we arrived, were led upstairs to a sitting room, and given a card with instructions in English.
The first one told us that use of a “Bathing Costume” was mandatory. They had lots and lots of really sweet, yucky tea sitting there for us to force down… I mean for us to enjoy.
You get a locker, change into your costume, and take a shower.
The first room is very dark, and you can smell the four oils they use for the massage. There is lavender, rose, red amber and orange blossom. I chose the lavender. There are also two cold plunge pools, about three feet deep.
The next room has a big tile swimming pool of warm water, about three feet deep. There is light streaming in from above through these eight-pointed star shaped holes in the ceiling. The room is pretty dim, with arches all around and candles on the floor and top of the arches. Massage tables are tucked back into the arches. It is very pretty.
Then there is a room with two deeper “hot” pools, that are maybe 100°, and a door into a steam room that smelled a little of eucalyptus.
So we sat and soaked and plunged and steamed and soaked some more. About the time I was changing from “prune” to “disgusting shriveled old man” we were called over to lay on a huge slab of warm marble. I thought we were going to be sacrificed, but no, they used a slightly bristly sort of mitt thing and lightly scrubbed my legs, back, shoulders and arms, then they dumped copper bowls of warm water over me to rinse. Finally, they take this long nylon sort of tube, weird thing filled with foam and dump it on you. It takes two dumps to cover a person like me. You lay there and foam a bit. It is strange, the foam actually has weight to it, and you feel tingly.
Flip over, do the front.
Get up, stagger to a massage table and get a massage (back and legs only).
Then back to soak until they ring the bell that your session is over.
So, I know… you want to know how it was.
Well, OK to good.
We talked about it, and rated it better than the second bath we had in Budapest, but not as good as the one in Baden-Baden, or the Széchenyi baths in Budapest, or even the Stewart Mineral Springs near Weed, California. The cost was €55 which is on the expensive side for Europe. I think we should have gotten more pool time for the cost, and a better massage.
So, I still vote for Baden-Baden as the best.
We went back up to our room where Gail dried her hair, before heading down the street to dinner. It was only 20:00, but we were hungry after the baths.
We saw a place called Museo de la Tapa y el Vino. The Museum of Wines and Tapas. Great name. We decided to become more cultural, and to start right now.
This is the first museum of the trip, I think.
They had some interesting sounding and looking tapas, so we took a seat and were soon joined by a couple glasses of wine, water, some bread and some tapas. The sheep cheese in oil was great, the crispy lettuce with caramelized garlic was fair and the asparagus wrapped with salmon was better. But the thing that got everyone’s attention was the Bull’s Tail.
It is supposed to be a specialty here, so I thought “OK” and just went for it.
The people on both sides were pretty interested in it and asked what it was. It looked like a nice chunk of beef with a good sauce. The hidden part no one could see was the big tail bone, which took up most of the space. So, it tasted good and had a good sauce, but you had to gnaw little bits of meat off, so that was kind of a letdown.
The people on both sides did not learn from my experience, and they had to get one to try as well.
Well, we started talking more and more with the Dutch couple next to us, and we finally gave up the “across two tables” talk and just pulled our tables together so we could talk better. They were Ricus and Joyce, from the northern part of Holland, and we just had a great time talking about travel, life in our countries, food and careers.
It is interesting to hear about life in Holland, subsidized housing, costs of the University, health care changes they are going through.
"I don't like the changes in our system at all, but when I read about the system in the US, I have nothing to complain about at all."
Cost of housing, taking and setting up trips, the Nederland football team and the tragic loss to España four years ago, the weather in Northern Holland, the fact that the people in North Holland can tell she is from South Holland by her dialect, how lazy are the Spanish, Italians and Greeks compared to the driven workers of Northern Europe, yet how fun and relaxing it is to visit here.
We had an interesting discussion about the various political parties in Europe, including the tidbits that the liberal party here is actually the equivalent of our conservative party, how they have so many splintered parties now that no one party can rule and thus they must compromise (which sounds really good to me as I think of the gridlock in the US caused by the “no-compromise” faction of the Republican party), and some real conservative nut riding the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and using that to propose all sorts of whack reforms.
They pinpoint the start of their troubles to the time when some leaders started proposing the Reagan - Thatcher “laissez faire” ideas here.
I shared a plate of good fried anchovies with Ricus, we bought a round of coffees, and we somehow missed the fact that everyone around us had left and the waiter had all the tables and chairs cleaned and stacked. So at 1:00 we shook hands and did the kiss-kiss-kiss thing, and we left with a promise to visit each other, inshallah.
I dropped Gail off at the room and went out to enjoy my one night in Cordoba, wandering the streets alone taking photos, before going home, opening all three balconies wide and sitting on the bed, by streetlight, to blog until now: 3:05.