Cordoba

So, we decided that bigger cities have more stuff and that's why you visit them, especially when you don't know anyone to visit and you can't just drop by a farm and introduce yourself because that is about as far as you can go in Spanish.  We got up and out by 7:30, back on the road (which is really no hardship because there is no significant traffic and the roads are new and safe and smooth now that tourism has become the economic engine).  I went back to sleep and Jon drove the two hours to Cordoba.  There were big swaths of olives again, and wide open plains and more geometric expanses of grape vines.  It was kind of a rainy/sunny day, maybe in the low 50s.  Mostly not raining.

We are much more adept at finding the city center now, following the helpful signs with the circle that looks like a target and the words "ciudad centro."  It is not rocket science for sure.  The old city is inside of a wall, like Jerusalem, and the parking garage that we used was just inside the wall, which seemed shocking to me.  Today we didn't have a good map so we wandered around, slightly disoriented, through the narrow alleys and lanes. We had two destinations:  the big cathedral/mosque and the Jewish quarter.  Jon thinks that they are trying to support the guided tour industry so they don't put any signs up.  A continuous stream of tour groups flowed around us as we walked around corners, doubling back, feeling unmoored by our lack of a map.  We did see actual church officials in purple robes and tall hats coming out of the cathedral to meet a casket that was carried by five men who were not particularly dressed in funeral attire.  Apparently the church was closed for an hour and a half for the funeral.  We felt like we had seen a snippet of real life.

But we had to attend to some physical needs.  Since arriving in Spain we have found, to our great satisfaction, that there is always a very nice public bathroom close by, wherever we are.  Today they were not so easy to find.  We paid 0.30 euros so that I could use one of those funny stand-alone toilets in a cylinder in the street.  That was the best 33 cents ever spent.  There was even a sink in there and the little round room was clean and cozy. Then we had cafe con leche in a tiny cafe and felt ready to face the work of tourism. 

Touching the toes of Maimonides
for good health -- one his many
pursuits was medicine.

The tiny (20' x 20') synagogue
built in 1315.

Because a walled city is a walled city, we eventually found the Jewish quarter (that was very close by the whole time) and the statue of Maimonides and the tiny synagogue: one of three left in all of Spain from medieval times.  It was a small room with a high ceiling, four walls, decorated like the Nasrid Palace in the Alhambra, with plaster patterns (reconstructed and renovated). There was a women's balcony off to the side, a place for the ark on the eastern wall, and not much else. Just across the street was a museum of the Sepharad, so we bought tickets for a tour that would start in about an hour.  We spent some time in a courtyard that housed an artist's co-op, and bought some Judaica from a tiny workshop.  All this on Shabbat. There is no Jewish presence here, only history.

One of the two museum guides
singing in Ladino.

One of the ways Jewish women could have a trade was
in fine needle-point brocades. They continued the
craft, even after becoming marrano, going on to
decorate church robes.

At the museum, there were two young men who did the tours and one young woman who took tickets and ran the gift shop.  The men spoke French and English and Spanish fluently, and switched between the languages as needed.  We joined a French-speaking tour group to listen to the introduction (in two languages) to some songs that one of the young men sang for us, tunefully and well, in Ladino. Then Jon and I had a private tour with Ramon who looks like Eric Plaksin because we were the only two English speakers there.  It is a very small museum with about six rooms: one to show how the single women had the job of making the silk and embroidering decorative ceremonial clothes (evolving later in Spanish culture to include the church and the bullfighters' attire).  Another room taught about the Jewish holidays because no one really knows about that in Spain anymore.  Another room houses the only true synagogue space in Cordoba because it has a Torah. A room about Maimonides, the brightest light to come out of Cordoba in medieval times, and next door a room about the darkest thing: the Inquisition.  That was where we spent the most time because Ramon had the most to say there: the main message was that it took several centuries of oppression and repression and violence and criminalizing to wipe out Judaism entirely in Spain.  He says that sadly, Spain has the unique distinction of being the only country in the Diaspora that succeeded in erasing the Jewish memory.  There were many families that held onto traditions, not even understanding them generations later, doing things because their mothers did them (and reinterpreting Biblical tradition because they had no written record of their own, creating saints like Saint Esther and Saint Moses). He said that one of the most reliable ways for them to remember their practices was to see the list of things that were forbidden, written out by the edict of the Inquisition.  We had forgotten that marrano means pig, or dirty.  He said that one of the ways that Jews tried to prove that they were true converts was by putting some pork into their Shabbat meals, as did the Muslims.  

Needless to say, we were curious about the stories of the two tourguides, but it didn't seem appropriate to ask.  They were juggling several tours at once, and they were so earnest and hardworking that we could only surmise that they somehow were Jewish themselves, in spite of the lack of Jewish community.  We asked the young lady who it was that built the museum and she said a historian who was interested in reviving awareness of the Jewish story.  

We had lunch outside (cold, should have been inside) in Plaza Juda Levi.  Tourist prices but not tourist flavors.  Real food served on real dishes, cooked just right. My "salad" was a plate full of perfectly prepared roasted vegetables. Jon's paella was made with local chicken instead of seafood.  

The best parts of the castle: the parapets,
the gardens ...

... and Hana.

Fortified yet again, we went to the castle of the Christian kings.  It looked like something out of Robin Hood, with towers and passageways and those classic castle walls.  The sign outside said that the Inquisition was run from inside those walls, as well as "planning the discovery of the Americas."  There were some lovely gardens with fountains and pools and orange trees.  I admired all the toddlers running around.  There are cute kids everywhere.

By now I was out of gas and was not at all curious about going into the cathedral that had been built inside a mosque, or vice versa.  My feet were tired.  We decided to skip the most famous thing in Cordoba and try to find our car instead.  

This time I drove and Jon slept.  We went to Malaga on the way home, in search of a wifi connection, a snack, a bathroom, and some groceries.  I thought to myself, if we were in the States, where would we go?  Parking is the biggest challenge, so I thought we would go to a strip mall of some kind. That is not a thing here, but we followed signs to a shopping center, which turned out to be a big mall.  Perfect. We joined the crowds at the mall, found a bathroom and a bar that sold snacks -- you just fill out an order form and bring it to the counter and they call your name when it is ready. Jon did all this by himself while I posted my backlog of daily updates.  The snacks were unremarkable, even though they had names that we recognized by now.  Malls are not really the place to get real food, but the wifi was excellent.

Pig in every style imaginable, including whole
himd-quarter and leg. This is only a fraction of the
full selection.

On the way out of Malaga we saw a Carrefour with a big parking lot. We have been warned that nothing at all will be open tomorrow, Sunday, so we stopped for groceries.  Or that's what we thought we were doing.  Turns out this store is kind of like a Target and a Walmart and a Costco but with more fancy ham than any of those stores would ever have.  We were looking for things like salt and matches.  Completely the wrong scale. Jon likes shopping and I don't, so he persevered much longer than I would have. I eventually found the salt but we never found matches.  We bought a beautiful cauliflower for one euro. In fact, food is surprisingly inexpensive here in the stores.

Since arriving in Frigiliana, we have only eaten out for dinner that one time with Benjamin.  But we eat on the Spanish time table -- we started cooking dinner at almost 10 PM tonight. We have cooked dinners that are more full of vegetables than anything we ever cook at home in the winter, and we keep re-inventing our leftovers. Tonight Jon blended the soup that I made yesterday and added day old bread.  And we have been eating chicory for salad! I really believe that the bitter escarole and endive we grow and the disgustingly bitter greens that Zach and Heinz grow are ALL meant to be grown in the winter in the Mediterranean region.  They taste delicious here.