Day: November 5, 2015

Charlie: Actually Christy and I had visited the Mezquita on our trip to Europe in 1969, a mere 46 years ago. I remember being much more impressed with it then than I was this time. Things are more amazing when you are 21. We took a taxi, but I am sure that I would have enjoyed observing present-day Cordoba on a walk from the train station to the Mezquita more than I enjoyed touring the Mezquita a second time. This feeling is not about the merits of the Mezquita or how anyone else should plan their travel but about how Wynette and I like to travel these days.

I did enjoy exploring the panorama:

and spherical:

modes on my camera. The spherical one looks great on the phone with the right software to display it.

Charlie: The top sight in Cordoba is the Mesquita, a huge mosque built in 785 and extended several times in the following centuries. Cordoba was reconquered by the Christians in 1236. In 1523, after three centuries of admirable restraint, and over the opposition of the town council, the Bishop of Cordoba convinced King Charles V (no relation to Charles Crowley)  to let them knock out a couple hundred of the columns and build a big cathedral right in the middle of the mosque. Scroll a little down on this page to see a 3D representation.

The cathedral is impressive but so much like a hundred others that I won’t include any photos. To his credit Charles V (this time possibly a relation to Charles Crowley) regretted his decision and said, quite eloquently, “You have built what you or others might have build anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world.”

Of course, you can see they might have been pretty angry about the Muslims invading their country and occupying it for five hundred years, that is a legitimate grievance but that had ended three hundreds years before.

The story seems so contemporary to me. Secular official concedes to the demands of an interest group even though he knows it is wrong to retain support of the interest group for political reasons.

Charlie and Wynette: No chocolate factory tour but it does give golden agers 40% off on train tickets. We used it to go to Cordoba. We went to the train station to buy the return ticket and realized we had left the tarjetas doradas back in Sevilla.

The cards would only save us about 15 euros each but we went into the information place to see if there was a record of it. The nice man on the right tried for 30 minutes to get it to happen, assisted by the nice man on the left, but for all their efforts, no go. It seems that the tickets are not recorded nationally but each train station gives out its own.

Both men clearly worked past the end of their shift — note how our guy had removed his standard issue tie and jacket — but they kept on, cheerfully, trying to make it happen and were very apologetic when they couldn’t.

Unfortunately we missed the next train trying to get this done so we took a (much less expensive) local that was fun and we did beat the next, next, fast train by 30 minutes. Even the local got up to 150 kph (90 mph), but it stopped more. The fast train tops out at 250 kph (150 mph).

The man went on about how beautiful Cordoba is (it was) but confided to us that things do not happen quickly in Spain. Good to know.