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Travelogue: Spain and Portugal
Cordoba: Getting There
Yesterday's afternoon coffee seemed to have no ill effects. We got about 10 hours of sleep, such a luxury for me! We woke up in plenty of time to get to the station, have breakfast there, and catch our 11:00 AVE train to Cordoba.
All over Spain, we had noticed that fresh orange juice was very popular. This seemed to be especially true in Sevilla. It stands to reason, since orange groves blanket the region, and there's even a variety of orange named after the town. Dan ordered an orange juice with breakfast, and this gave us an opportunity to see the workings of the juicer machine. We had seen this particular type of juicer all over, but usually from the back. They typically have two wire chutes that feed the oranges into the machine. Each orange is sliced in half and rotated against a juicer mechanism. This was fun to watch, and the results were delicious.
The boarding process for the AVE train was something like getting on a plane: we "checked in" at a window, then our bags were x-rayed. My poor film had already been x-rayed a number of times. As I've said before, the AVE is a very nice train. Our ride is super-smooth, and everything feels new and nicely done. We saw many, many, many orange groves along the way to Cordoba!
We decided to walk from the train station into the city. There was an odd sign at the first big intersection we came to. It had an LED display that refreshed frequently, graphing the levels of different environmental pollutants, noting the sources of the pollution, and ranking how harmful they are to people, plants and animals.
Our general goal for Cordoba is to get to the Mezquita, the venerable and enormous mosque in the old section of the city. To get there, we first walked through a series of city gardens, Jardines Diego de Rivas and Jardines de la Victoria, that runs along a row of grubby high-rise apartment buildings. Once we passed this perimeter and got into the older part of the town, Cordoba was lovely and charming. We soon lost ourselves in aimless wandering and picture taking.
