Cordoba

My first night in Cordoba was spent in a Medieval guest house ran by a softly spoken German woman called Carola. I had to cut my walk that day slightly short as I had to arrive at the guest house in the morning as Carola had a wedding in Cadiz in the afternoon. I walked through a lush park, down the main highstreet which opened into a huge plaza and then right through various streets until I came to the small ally which the guesthouse backed onto. After trying various bells, I found the right one and Carola came and opened the gate, with the languid stride of someone walking through an allotment. 'Tonight you are going to be sleeping in a Medieval house' she explained as she led me through into a beautifully lit patio with great potted plants and covered areas with seating. We climbed a flight of narrow, steep wooden stairs to a small bedroom with a low ceiling, and, low and behold, a kettle! My first in kettle in Spain, the possibilities seemed endless. 

Carola reappeared later in sandals and definitely bra less under her matching orange tshirt and 3/4 lengths get up. She smiled bashfully and towel dried her short greying hair as I left, map in hand, with a whole afternoon ahead of me for sightseeing. 

I walked around the town for hours, submerging into the torrent of tourists and then escaping into a juice bar where I had an amazing salad with oregano and feta cheese. The owner was a woman with dark haired arms and two little girls who scrambled around her feet with a dog. Her partner sat outside with a cigarette, his teeth as dark as her arms, which on an English man would have looked awful but they were rather flattering on him. 

When I returned to the house I met Denise, a middle-aged Californian work away with thick silvery tresses which she could wind and coil to her hearts content. It was her last week in Cordoba before she travelled north to see some more of Spain and then she was planning on going to Ecuador for three months. She was very petite, with a heart shaped face now I think of it, and she carried around a jar of water with slices of lemons in. After talking for some time we went to get a slice of potatoe omelette together and then went to the cinema for 95 cents and watched Much Ado About Nothing. We crossed the Roman bridge over the river to get a better look at Cordoba lit up at night and came across an amatuer flamenco show which was being held in protest against the local community centre being shut down. It turned out that Denise, as I had suspected, was an all out hippie chick; married at 17 and went to live in a commune in India with her two babbies and husband when she was twenty one. Since then however, she hadn't really had the chance to travel much, and so with no job and the kids all grown with families of their own, she had decided to return to the land of her Spanish ancestors.

The next day I rose early in order to get into the Mezquita for free. It was absolutely beautiful, the golds and the blues were like a relief from the Cordoban heat and everything was silent, finally. Apart from my stomach. Hemingway said one can only truly appreciate art on an empty stomach but then if I smoked and drank as much as he did I don't think I'd feel like eating either. And so, reluctantly, my hunger frog marched me out of the Mezquita and I had tomatoe on toast served by a woman who looked at me like I was some tight fisted barnacle for wanting tap water not coffee. I returned to Carola's sanctuary, which I was having to leave for some accommodation which I had booked but had had received no information about from its host. The afternoon was passing by and I was slightly worried because all of the hostals were full as it was the festival of the patios in Cordoba. Denise and I went back to the house she shared with the other work away for a brainstorm and one of her ecaudorian chocolate ice creams. The house smelt of stone and faintly spicy, with high ceilings and a riddling layout of rooms at different levels. There was also a proper fly infestation problem; they were everywhere, sitting on the walls and waiting, not the really disgusting kind that go for poo but the sort that magically appear if you've left your uneaten take away out for a couple of days. The girls had stuck up long strips of dangling tape to combat the problem but these seemed to catch Denise more successfully than the flys. We decided that I could sleep on the sofa in the flat, which didn't look so bad after pounding out its lumps and brushing off the flys. I was thirty euros down from paying for a room which  I wasn't going to stay in but I didn't really mind. With all my worries put to bed (aha) I returned to the juice bar for another salad, sandwich and juice meal deal and Denise went to welcome some guests.

In Cordoba my spending spiraled out of control slightly. I'm not really sure why, I am susceptible to 'treating' myself for no particular reason other than I managed to wake up and get dressed all by myself. Well done. As I ate my lunch I started to receive really strange messages with strings of numbers from Roberto, the guy who was supposed to be renting out his room to me. Eventually he called me and instructed me, rather aggressively, to meet him in this square I'd never heard of. I kept asking him to write me the address which he wouldn't do and he was generally treating me like I was an inconvenience rather than a guest. After an hour or so he decided to meet me where I was, so I collected my bag at Carola's and returned to the juice bar where I met Roberto, in all his agro glory. I think a combination of Napoleon syndrome and early onset balding had contributed to his countenance, and as he marched me to the flat in the midday heat I also discovered that he was a complete cowboy and racist. With this in mind, my expectations for my accomodation was fairly low. He also told me I would be sharing the flat with a couple who were leaving the next day and perhaps I could have a beer with them. He made to leave almost as soon as we entered the place and as he said goodbye he took off the sporty sunglasses he had been donning the entire time. Nature had not been particularly kind to Roberto, his eyebrows were a different color to what little head hair he had left, and he would almost have had my sympathies if he hadn't texted me ten minutes after leaving asking me to leave the money in the flat for him. 

I went to the supermarket to buy my food for walking on Monday and took it back to the flat. The potential beer with the couple didn't seem likely; they hardly said hello and spoke only in whispers to one another apart from when the guy was in the shower when he would sing really passionately. Entirely odd. I left the flat and went to the cinema again and watched a film set in ww2 England which was for the most part pretty slow until the end when the family relocated to somewhere on the Thames because their house had been bombed out. It reminded me of home and summer and scones whilst watching Wimbledon and as the credits rolled I was a nostalgic wreck. I went to see Denise and we went out for ice cream and walked around the town until we found a concert hall where a pop group were playing, so we sat outside with everyone else who couldn't get tickets and listened. 

The next day I left the flat early and went for breakfast at the local. I decided I wanted to go and see the synagogue but ended up queuing for the Alcazar by mistake. It was beautiful inside though, so so many plants and fountains and lots of the lemons on the ground which I picked up to make lemonade with later. I went to meet Denise and took her to the juice bar for lunch where I talked to the guy about his music and watched a double wedding party drive by. We went back to Denise's afterwards and planned her trip to the North of Spain, which she would start the next weekend. I felt like a bit of an oracle and insisted that she went to Segovia and tried to some of the Camino. After a long siesta we decided to celebrate my last night with desert at a restaurant owned by this guy Denise really fancied but, as it turns out, was going out with her Spanish tutor. Me and Denise talked just as much as we ate and I probed her on her alternative lifestyle and tried to process and digest everything at the same time. The desert in the wine glass was amazing, caramel and cinnamon heaven sent wonder and afterwards we walked it off to the community centre and then back towards the Mezquita. 

Back home everyone seems to talk about the future and dream about how they want to live their life but here I'm meeting people who are actually just doing it. University still seems like this safe option even though I know I really want to go, sometimes I can't stand the thought of it and other times I think I just want to do degrees for a decade and then be a dusty old proffessor. I'm starting to realize that everything, in some way, is a bubble. A nine till five job, university, family, school, friends etc I understood for sure, but I know now that to think traveling is an escape from the bubble is wrong. Traveling is a bubble, a really nice Lenor one, where you get to be at your most free moving and passionate and have deep conversations with relative strangers because your this high ball of emotions and experiences. I know now the difference between inspiration and enlightenment, and I think a lot of people travel to become 'enlightened' when in fact, travel alone can only inspire. It's when you go back to reality, the bubble you call home, with all it's mundanity, I think thats where you'll find enlightenment. I don't fully understand the concept of enlightenment yet, I'm just very certain that it's different from inspiration. I also realize that this whole argument is rather tenuously linked by a general cynicism and, as yet, is without conclusion.

I said my farewells to Denise after a few beers and returned to the flat where I found a note from Roberto asking for his money. I didn't sleep a wink that night, imagining him coming to the flat with a couple of bailiffs for my money belt. I missed Denise terribly and fled Cordoba with €30 on my head.