Day 18 - Cordoba

Gelati: 2, Drink: 1 glass wine, 2 glasses beer, Tapas: 0

I got an email today from the Granada hotel saying they had charged my credit card for my stay and attached a scan of my receipt.  All well and good.  The email then went on to say I should have gone to the sister hotel which is staffed 24 hours a day.  I felt like sending back a rude email saying "didn't you read my original email?   The sister hotel was locked up and no-one was there either!".  I didn't in the end since, after all, what would be the point?  If I do go back to Granada, I'm not going to stay at either place.

I spent the morning here visiting the Mezquita.  It started life as a Christian Visigoth church before becoming a mosque.  Over time it became one of the largest in the world and was very beautiful.  After the Christian reconquest of Andalusia it was turned back into a church and wrecked.  All the arcades were bricked up and turned into chapels to various saints, complete with paintings showing them being martyred in gruesome ways, so it is now very gloomy.  They also ruined the symmetry of the building inside by plonking an ugly great cathedral in the middle.  Even the king who authorised the work thought it was a bad thing to have done.  Mind you, they've dug up part of the floor of the place and have uncovered roman ruins.  Apparently there was a roman temple on the site originally so there is precedent for pulling things down and building over them.

After this I visited the Palace of Viana which is famous for having 12 patios/courtyards and 1 garden.  It dates originally from the 14th century but has be modified and added to over the years.  The garden and 11 of the 12 patios were lovely (the 12th dates from about 10 years ago and may get better with age, it is just too stark and empty now).  Every patio had a water feature and many plants, most of which were in bloom.  I was amused to listen to other people raving over plants that are common in Australia but are obviously much harder to grow in an English climate.  Wisteria got them particularly excited.  I kept thinking that stuff is practically a weed.  If you don't hack it back regularly (weekly almost in the summer) it will take over your house.  I can't imagine needing to lavish love and care on it.

I then visited a much smaller, traditional Andalusian house.  Again, the rooms opened onto patios at the slightest provocation but it was just the size of a largish normal house.  Apparently, it was originally the house of a paper merchant and there were displays on how paper was made and many items for sale on handmade paper.  I was particularly amused by the horoscopes in various languages.  There were none for Leos in either English or Italian but I managed to find a French one that I could (mostly) read.  I'm not sure what the lack of Leo pages indicates.  Are we few in number so they didn't bother to print many or we just more credulous so we've bought them all?

On the way to this house I saw an amusing dog dominance incident.  Lots of people have dogs here and many have those silly rat-sized things.  I saw two friends, each with their dogs, meet up.  One had a real dog (an Alsatian) while the other had a rat dog.  The humans ignored their dogs and chatted.  The rat dog went berserk challenging the Alsatian.  It growled and barked and made little abortive lunges at the bigger dog, while the bigger dog just looked at it with a puzzled expression.  Finally, the Alsatian lost patience and put out one paw and flattened the rat thing to the ground, at which point it finally shut up.

I then had lunch.  I started with salmorejo (yes, there is a theme here).  It came with the usual trimmings (chopped egg and jamon) and also a drizzle of olive oil.  It was a bit chunkier than usual and very good.  Main was another traditional Andalusian dish - flammenquin.   This is a pork fillet with a slice of jamon on top which is then rolled up, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried.  There is a reason why this dish isn't more widely known.  Dessert was fresh strawberries - in theory.  Some were fresh, some were underripe and some overripe.  The coffee was good.

After lunch I attempted to visit the Caliphate's baths.  This is a traditional arab bath complex from the 12th century.  I tried to go yesterday but got there 10 minutes before closing.  Today I showed up 5 minutes after closing, so it was not to be.

Finally, I went for my own bath.  There are two modern bath houses here in Cordoba.  One sounded more authentic.  From my reading of their website you only do the warm-hot-cold-steam circuit once and then spend as much time as you like in the 'floating pool'.  However, as there is no time limit on how long people stay or any minimum age limit it sounded as if it could also be crowded and noisy.  Not really the self-indulgent, pampering experience I'm after.

I ended up going to the other baths that are run by the same crowd that manage the baths in Granada.  The layout here was a little different.  Again, separate rooms for each pool but the pools were larger and deeper.  The rooms were decorated with red and cream tiles and arches modelled on those in the Mezquita.  The ceilings had star-shaped holes cut in them but here they were skylights rather than artificial lights so this complex was the prettiest but I did like being able to swim from pool to pool in the baths in Seville.

To make this experience different this time I opted for the full Al Andalus 'ritual'.  This is the skin scrubbing from before followed by a regular massage.  I got to watch someone else have this done and saw how they cover you in bubbles.  They basically fill an enormous piping bag with bubbles and then pipe them all over you like you are a giant cake.  This time when I got the skin scrubbing they scrubbed my midriff too which didn't happen in Granada.  Made me wish I hadn't eaten so much for lunch.  However, the massage was very pleasant.  Not as firm as a therapeutic massage but more than just skin polishing.  The masseur clearly knew his stuff and kept trying to work out the knots in my shoulders and neck.  I didn't have the heart to tell him he's wasting his time and it will take more than a few minutes of massage to work out the stress from years spent hunched over computers.

One thing I've noticed with all this bathing is that you can tell English and American woman from European ones very easily.  The former typically wear one-piece bathing suits and generally keep themselves covered in their towels when not actually in a pool.  The European woman wear teeny tiny bikinis regardless of age, size, shape and quantity of cellulite and only use the towels to dry themselves.  I just use a towel for drying and wear a bikini but not a teeny tiny one.  Fitting given my half European half English background really.

Dinner was at a random cafe and was what a Frenchman would call a salad nicoise but was called an ensalada andalusia here.  It would have been much better if they had bothered to drain the water from the can of tuna before dumping it into the bowl with the rest of the salad ingredients.  The disappointing food was made up for by the entertainment of listening to the American couple attempting to order their salads with dressing on the side.  The waitress only had minimal english and they had no spanish so communication was difficult.  What was more difficult is that it is standard practice here for you to get your own bottles of oil and vinegar to dress your own salad.  The idea that a salad would come pre-dressed was utterly foreign to the waitress so she had trouble understanding what on earth they were on about.  They were trying to order plain, steamed rice when I left (why on earth I don't know).

Off to Barcelona tomorrow to catch up with Vanessa and also, apparently, Rachele and Generoso.  Should be fun.