Driving through the fields of dead sunflowers on our way to Granada this morning I was struck by just how sleepy Córdoba seemed, especially when compared to Seville.
It’s really not surprising when you consider our timing- the hottest part of summer, when everyone with any sense is at the beach. Sevilla has been popular for years and is popular all year round. It’s the stuff of legends- bull fights, Hemingway, amazing tapas, one of those places where all the major tourist sites are within a kilometre of each other, insulated by the quaint golden-edged streets of the Juderia. I think it’s fair to say that staying in Seville leaves you with fairly high expectations of wherever you go next.
Córdoba, on the other hand, is famous for one thing and one thing only – the Mezquita, an ancient Muslim Mosque, that is, until the Catholic reconquest of 1236, when the conquistadors erected a Cathedral in the heart of it. It’s even more amazing when you consider that before the Mezquita was built, there was a church on that site, the remains of which have now been found under the floor of the Mezquita. This sounds incredible, I know (and it is), but after a weeks of travelling we may have had a touch of monument-fatigue, along with incredibly high expecatations of what the Mezquita would be, especially after seeing the Alcázar (look on way and it’s the Alhambra, look the other and it’s the Mezquita).
I don’t want to give you the impression that Cordoba wasn’t fairly amazing. I know it’s not actually possible for something to be ‘fairly amazing’ either it’s amazing or it’s not, but that’s kind of how we felt about the place. The Mezquita alone was so beautiful but unfortunately the cathedral part of it was being restored when we were there. As a result the large cavernous interior took me (with my somewhat impatient nature) about 20 minutes to explore. The place is vast, all striped red-and-white arches and marble floors, but I wasn’t in the mood to be amazed. That’s something you’re not really prepared for when you travel, that you might get sick of being amazed. But there are days I guess when you want to lie in bed, eating crisps and watching Hollywood movies dubbed in Spanish (or equivalent) wherever you are, and this was one of those days for me.
The arches of the Mezquita.
The ceiling of the cathedral in the Mezquita.
It was in Cordoba that we realised something Sydney (and Australia as a whole) really has going for it – breakfast culture. I guess it comes from being settled by the English as well as being a fairly multicultural country without thousands of years of culinary history behind us, but it’s true. In Spain as in Portugal, breakfast is a non-event. In Portugal we found people love to go out for lunch, say on a Sunday for a few hours and in Spain dinner seemed more to be the thing and lunch was the way to get value for money. But in Sydney, there’s breakfast.
This might sound ridiculous to you- how can the Iberians get through the morning without eating SOMETHING? I’d like to point out that it’s not that they don’t eat breakfast, it’s that it’s either a cereal/toast/juice/coffee at home affair, or pastry-and-black-coffee out. I was starting to crave Newtown breakfasts, the many kinds of toast, the wanky garnishes, fetta, balsamic, spinach, roast pumpkin, poached eggs, barlotti beans, hash browns. Breakfast is the best bang for buck back home and I was missing shelling out $10-$15 and eating something that would keep me going until some semblance of afternoon tea. Being a vego, there was only so much tortilla española and Gazpacho I could eat and I was starting to feel a bit strange. Walking for most of the day requires something other than Patatas Ali Oli as fuel. I thought I could live on them to begin with, but I was mistaken.
I’d promised myself that I’d at least experience one Catholic mass in Spanish by the end of our trip, and it was in Córdoba that I finally got around to it. It was bizarre experience. It was exactly the same yet completely different from every other mass I’ve ever been to, in an old stone church with an ornate, gold-detailed alter. It was funny, because obviously mass is spoken to be heard and understood, so I could understand what the Priest was saying, by and large. Anything I didn’t know for sure I could guess, because a mass is the same the world over. But I wasn’t prepared for the isolating feeling of not being able to respond. Sure, I could stand up and sit down in all the right places, but I didn’t know what to say and everybody else did. I felt like I was intruding and had this paranoid feeling that I was going to get found out – as a non-Spanish speaker and as a non-Catholic. I had also forgotten just how dull church can be. I was taken back to being a child and being forced to sit for an hour each Sunday and be good. The difference was that this was of my own choosing and thankfully, the service went for less than 45 minutes.
But by far my favourite moment of Córdoba came when we ducked into the only corner store open that day to grab something to eat. We assembled some cheese, olives, bread, garbanzos, jamón and a tomato, but we had nothing to cut it with. Rui said something in Portuñol (Español crossed with Português) which the shopkeeper took to mean we wanted him to cut it up for us. So I summoned up al my courage and, not being able to remember the word for ‘knife’ I managed to choke out ‘No…tienes…uh, algo para…cortar?’ (‘Do you have something to cut with?’). The guy handed me a crappy plastic knife and it was my happiest day in Córdoba. I may go home and fail every unit of University Spanish I take from this day forth, but I will never forget the word for knife as long as I live. Nor will I forget the feeling of achievement that comes with successfully getting your message across in a language you feel you hardly know.
