My new room at La Residencia is, well, decked out. Mini-fridge, desks, lamp, toilet paper, towels, sheets, phone, trash bin were all-included; didn't have to pay a single dime. Additionally, I get my very own bathroom. Plus, every Wednesday, a maid comes in to clean all of our rooms. When I said this was like a working vacation, I wasn't just whistling Dixie. Or Yankee. Or what have you.
My classes are easy enough, so far. My economics classes are more or less a joke. One is taught by a political science professor. Smart guy, but I am more accustomed to having to crunch equations than having to sit through recitations of all of the treaties that were formed to create the current EU. Being a rather avid reader of the news, this gets a might bit tedious. The other econ class is somewhat better, although the expectations are still pretty low. No graphs, unfortunately. Just papers.
I do have a midterm in Islamic Art and Architecture on Tuesday, so I'll be studying for that today. That class is conducted in Spanish, so its a bit more difficult in that sense. But Arabic is really the only class that's remotely difficult. Having gotten a basic grounding in Hebrew, it gives me a bit of an edge over most students (I got a 45.25/50 on my last quiz, compared to an average of 39). But its still a really difficult language, just in learning the alphabet. They have sounds that just plain don't exist in English. Soon, we're going to start learning vocabulary, so I hope that the endless repetition of the letters will make it easier to distinguish certain sounds. However, although I was initially hesitant to start taking Arabic, I think even this one semester of it will be a good investment. Even a basic knowledge of the language puts me head and shoulders over many other people.
Now, to Cordoba. With pictures!
So last Saturday, we took a class field trip to Cordoba, which was one of the last capitals of Moorish Spain. At the height of the Umayyad Caliphate, Cordoba was the largest city in Europe (at 500,000 people), and some people reckon it was the largest in the world. Additionally, Cordoba is home to one of only 3 synagogues still surviving from the Al-Andalus time period. As a modern city, its only medium-sized, but I was reasonably impressed. The city was immensely cleaner than any I'd been to (except for Madrid), and one could tell after walking around that it was a city that prided itself on a high-quality of life.
The first stop of the trip was at the ruins of a summer palace of the Caliphs of Spain, not far from the city proper. One thousand years ago, the city surrounding the palace was meant to be magnificent, but during a civil war between competing factions, the city was razed, and then buried, until 1911. Most of the pictures I took were of buildings that were reconstructed by later teams of archaeologists, but sd far, only an estimated 10% of the original size of the city has been excavated:
We then hopped back on the bus and moved on to Cordoba itself, specifically la Juderia.
Me at the Gate to the Juderia.
Back when Cordoba was essentially the capital of Spain, it had the largest Jewish community in the world(Maimonides was born here), and the old Jewish quarter (where the synagogue sits), still has the feel of something out of the 13th century. The streets are narrow, the houses white washed, and trying to make your way around begins to seem like sorting your way out of a labyrinth:
The ark of the synagogue. Although you can't really see it in this picture, the walls are covered with inscriptions in Hebrew.
The real jewel of la Juderia isn't the synagogue, per se, although it was pretty cool. La Juderia ensconces the Grand Mezquita (Great Mosque) of the Caliphs, now one of the largest churches in Spain. The effect of visiting this building is just downright unsettling. Allow me to explain.
The Mezquita was supposed to be the architectural tour de force of Moorish Spain. And it is. At the time, it was the second largest mosque in the world. However, when it was conquered by the Catholics, they converted it into a cathedral. The effect is more creepy than inspiring. Its just plain weird to see stained glass windows of Jesus and Mary looking down on red and white horseshoe arches. Stranger still to see the underside of the old minaret, with bright white plastered cherubs, superimposed on the faded brown stones:
Yeah, weird. Anyway, the scenes inside were still pretty spectacular:
That's the minaret/belltower. When it was turned into a cathedral, it had to be completely redone, since the original minaret was obviously not designed to carry two several tonne bells.
This is the central courtyard. Its magnificent. Especially impressive are the gullies that are cut into the stone flooring to self-irrigate the trees when it rains. If you look very closely at the trees, you'll see the lines on the ground that connect each tree. The lines end in little fountain pools, out of sight of this picture.
Perhaps not the best picture, but it starts to give a feel for how big it is. You can see the trademark arches on the left, which are definitely NOT a style commonly associated with Christianity in the West. Red and white are the main themes, as in Islamic art, they are considered the colors of beauty. Additionally, in formal religious imagery that'll show up in these pictures is from the Christian era, because it is forbidden in Islamic art to show pictures of any living creature: human, animal, or divine.
The rows upon rows of arches.
The altar.
Etc. I'll put the rest on a facebook album. It was at about this point that my camera ran out of batteries anyway, so I didn't get to take many pictures of what I personally considered the coolest part of the whole excursion: The Gardens of the Alcazar.
The Alcazar of Cordoba was both a fortress and a palace for the Caliphs, and the Gardens that were built in its interior were nothing short of enchanting. I thought they were great. At the end of my trip, I'm going to compile an album of greatest hits, and surely I'll be able to scrape together a few of them. There were fountains. Statuary. Irrigation networks. Shrubs, hedge rows, orange trees, everything. Like something out of Arabian Nights.
Awesome.
Anyway, we left back for Granada shortly thereafter, but I would definitely like to return at some point in my life. And hopefully, I'll be able to take more pictures!
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