Day 2 – Toledo and arriving in Cordoba (June 2018)

Hi everyone,

This post continues our Spain adventures. So, when we left off last, we had just arrived in Madrid. The next morning, we got up raring to go. First up, we went back to the Madrid airport to collect the car we would be spending the week in.  Loz and JD kindly looked after the baggage as Josh organized the car.

Once we received the keys, we were so excited to meet our rental car however when we got to the car, we were not too sure about driving it around Spain for a week because…

Nonetheless, we braved our number plate, packed the car and began our Spanish road trip.  The first thing I noticed driving around was the Spanish countryside had so many poppies growing everywhere!

Our first stop on our Spanish road trip – Toledo.

Toledo is an old Spanish city on the top of a hill. We were really looking forward to seeing this city because it boasts examples of architecture influenced by Christian, Muslim and Jewish cultures. I really enjoyed walking around and looking at all the lovely old buildings.

Walking around Toledo, we noticed all the buildings were decorated with wreaths and ribbons everywhere. It turns out, we had arrived the day after of Corpus Christi which is also known as the Day of Wreaths.

We decided to take the opportunity to get some lovely group shots.

All of our walking around made us hungry.

We were totally happy with her choice.

After lunch, we continued our tour of Toledo. We found a altar where unmarried women place sewing pins to help them find their husband. We did not have a sewing pin but JD graciously sacrificed a bobby pin for Loz to make an offering.

From here, we walked to the Mosque of Toledo which is one of the major attractions of Toledo.  I’ll confess that at the Mosque, I was very confused to see this guy…

It turns out, there are a lot of Muslim influenced buildings all over Spain however these buildings were converted into churches when different civilizations took over Spain. So, when they say a building is a mosque, it’s probably been converted into a church.  The Mosque of Toledo was only a single room. However, the view from the Mosque was incredible.

And because we’re all class, we decided to take a selfie.

From here, we went to the Synagogue of Toledo. On our way, we found the Toledo campus of a Spanish University and it looked like this…

I tell you what, if Deakin looked like this, I would have spent a lot more time at uni.  The synagogue was pretty inside.

From the Synagogue, we moved on to the Monastery of Toledo.  First however, we had to pass through the guard looking over us:

So here’s a question, why is he lying down like some playboy model. Also, why would anyone pose a skeleton like this?? Once inside though, it was totally worth it.

After this, we trooped over to the Cathedral of Toledo.  This was a lovely building however I don’t want all of you to be “old building” out by the end of this series of posts. So, I’m going to save my serious cathedral pictures for one of the later posts.  After the cathedral, we decided it was time to move on.  This time, we delved further into the Spanish countryside and to my surprise, every other hill in the Spanish countryside had a huge castle on the top.

After a couple of hours of driving (Truth: Josh drove the whole time), we finally reached Cordoba. Although we were pretty tired, we still made sure to walk around Cordoba to see what it was like at night. This was the sight that greeted us when we stepped out from our airbnb:

I’m going to leave it here and let you know what we got up to in Cordoba in the next post.

Talk soon,

Sim & Josh