This past week I’ve been very busy with schoolwork and various other things. Since spring break is only two weeks away, our professors have been loading on the work for midterms. It’s not nearly as much work as I would normally have at UNH, but it’s a lot more than I’ve been used to here in Spain. I guess it’s not just a five-month vacation after all.
Last weekend we went on a trip to Sevilla and Córdoba, two very beautiful cities. Our guide for the trip is my literature teacher, MariCarmen, who is a talking the probably the smartest person I have ever met in my life. She knows everything about everything we pass. I don’t think she stopped talking for the 3 hours on the way there or back to my professor. She spits out so much information you can only listen to her in waves, but she always gets our attention when she says “gossip, gossip!” or “muy, muy, muy, muy importante”. We left for Sevilla Saturday morning and our first stop was Plaza of Spain. This huge circular shaped plaza has a small river/moat going around it where you can rent paddle-boats to row in, or you can go around the plaza via horse and buggy. There are four bridges that cross the river, and in the center of it all is a beautiful water fountain. Today it’s mostly governmental buildings like the town hall, but is a huge tourist attraction and has also been used in films, such as Star Wars Episode II.
After Plaza de España the Royal Alcazar palace was our next stop. This palace is the oldest palace in the world where a royal family still lives. The garden of Alcazar is so vast and beautiful I couldn’t see the actual walls of the palace when we entered the garden. Most of the architecture is Arabic and is absolutely gorgeous. One of the ponds with a fountain has huge gold fish, but mostly carps. MariCarmen took a piece of bread from my sandwich and threw it into the pond of monsters, as she calls them, and all the fish jump out of the water trying to grab the piece of bread making weird sucking noises, it was quite gross.
After our tour of Alcazar, we headed to the cathedral for our tour. Like every I've seen, it was very beautiful. My favorite part was when we climbed to the top of the tower where the bells are and where you can look out across the whole city of Sevilla.
That night in Sevilla we went to the theatre to see “El perro del hortelano”, which is a comedy. We’ve been talking about the play in class and watched the movie, so we knew the main points of the play before we went unlike the last play in Madrid, which turned into a two-hour nap for most people. I only fell asleep for about twenty or so minutes, but it was a good production and the actors were very funny. 
Early Sunday morning we departed for Córdoba. On the way there, we stopped at the ruins of Medinat al-Zahra. Before the Catholic Kings, Muslims conquered Spain, hence the huge influence of Arabic architecture and culture throughout Spain. One of the legends of these ruins were that the Caliph of Córdoba built this city for one of his slaves he fell in love with, but he actually just wanted to build a city for himself. In the eighth century, Córdoba had the largest Muslim population with about 500,000 citizens; Paris had the largest Christian population with 10,000 citizens. The Muslim impact across Spain is huge, especially here in Granada, which comes as a shock to most people since it has been so Catholic since the Catholic Kings started their reign.
In Córdoba, we visited the Jewish Quarter and the synagogue, which is one of the three significant synagogues remaining in Spain and mostly unaltered. The streets in this area of Córdoba are very narrow, white, and Moorish looking. Flowerpots hang from the walls and the ground is cobblestone. Back when the Caliphate controlled Córdoba, the Jewish community was very large and successful. Paved and lit streets all around the city made it very advanced for the time period. The Caliphate was very religiously tolerant and allowed both the Christian and Jewish communities to have self-governing communities, and made a profit off them at the same time through taxes for non-Muslim citizens. After the fall of the Muslim rule, the Jewish community started to dwindle under the Catholic Kings. However, the Quarter is very well preserved and shows how this community once flourished. Finally, we went to the very famous and absolutely beautiful mosque. According to my Islam culture professor, this is the most beautiful mosque in the world. It's gigantic with a cathedral in the center. When the Muslims took over Córdoba, the church was bought and around it they built a mosque. Since they were poor and didn't have sufficient money to buy columns for the new mosque, they would go around at night taking columns from other churches and ruins to put into the mosque, so in one whole part of the mosque are columns with different designs. Over the years it kept expanding and expanding and is still all standing today, all from the VIII century. When Córdoba went back under Christian rule, the king actually had the mosque stay as it was instead of destroying it like the normal routine. Since Córdoba was highly populated with Muslims, they figured it was fine if they went to pray at the mosque because the cathedral was there, and eventually they could convert them to Christianity. None of the picture I took do justice to this beautiful place nor capture the vastness of it. 
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