Around Madrid
December 11th, 2009As we get closer to the end of our time in Spain, we’ve had some decisions to make about where to go. It’s just not possible to see everything in a month, so we cut down the list and then did it again. Last weekend also turned out to be a holiday long weekend (Feast of the Immaculate Conception), so hotels everywhere were booked up and double the normal price. I’ve been getting a little tired of big cities anyway, so we made the crazy choice to avoid Madrid. I know, who goes to Spain, but doesn’t visit it? Well, we do. Instead we opted to skirt around Madrid and I’m not sorry because we got to see some pretty interesting places.
We left Valencia and headed for a place near Cuenca called the Ciudad Encatada, a park in the mountains with weird limestone formations. From there our next destination was Segovia where we visited the Alcazar castle. Up next was Toledo which has a great hilly old city with winding streets and a beautiful cathedral. Unfortunately the Alcazar here is closed (along with quite a few other museums) for restoration, but we still managed to see a few of the famous El Greco paintings. From there we stopped in Cordoba to visit the Mezquita, a former mosque turned cathedral. After all the sights we took in over the last week, I may have been getting a little immune to historic buildings at this point. The Mezquita was certainly the cure for that and I was surprised and delighted by the uniqueness of it. The design is totally different from anything we’ve seen before and since it is off-season we nearly had the place to ourselves. It’s huge and impossible to capture in photos, but here’s my attempt.
On another note, we’ve been trying out the local food specialties in each place, some with better results than others. The cochinillo (roast suckling pig – hooves and all) was a little too strong for my tastes, but Eric enjoyed it. We both found the salmorejo (a thick, cold tomato soup with chopped ham and egg) to be good, but very rich and filling. Overall the food has been good, but we’ve had to adjust to eating at 9:30 at night.
halftime