Toledo

Toledo.

So on the last weekend of February, my program had a whirlwind trip around two cities. On Friday we all boarded the bus and drove for about two and a half hours into the Spanish province of Castilla La Mancha. Now, for any of you who have read Don Quijote, this may be a bit of a repeat. Don Quijote is a story about a guy who thinks he is a knight and when he sees these molinas (windmills) he thinks they are giganticas (giants) and so he attacks them. On the way to Toledo, we stopped and looked saw the windmills. We also got a chance to look walk around for about five minutes. It was a bit chilly, but I was happy to get out and stretch my legs. I practically ran around a few windmills. I think it was at this point that I began to really miss grass. Like I hadn’t seen it in days, or a few weeks. And I really wanted to see grass, to walk on grass, to sit on grass. >_> it was a problem. It got fixed in Madrid, when I found a park with grass and walked on it for about fifteen minutes.

But Toledo, so we drove for a bit longer (got our coffee break, which happened every couple hours). If you go to Espana, don’t get coffee black, its disgusting, tastes terrible. You want café con leche (coffee with milk), its fairly good and comes with a packet of azucar (sugar).

So we got to Toledo, which is a small city. It’s fairly old with some neat architecture, but I couldn’t tell you the style of architecture. We got free time for about an hour. So we wandered around, found a cool looking church and some cool looking government buildings (that our tour guide later took us back to). We also got lost, and got to eat lunch, which I had some trouble with because I had butter and ham con queso (cheese) sandwiches. …it was the butter that got me.

Anyways, in Toledo we got to go to a bunch of churches. Desmesiado iglesias (to many churches). But in them we got to see some really cool paintings and some neat archtitecture. We weren’t allowed to take photos in a lot of them, and I don’t really remember too much about them. We got to see some pinturas by El Greco (a Spanish artist) who lived in Toledo, but we didn’t get a tour of his house.

We then got to see the monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes. It was really neat. On one of the roofs of building, its possible to see a cross in the roof tiles. We had a tour guide, but the guide spoke in Spanish so I didn’t actually follow most of what was being said/ if I followed it, I was concentrating so hard on translating it in my head that I don’t remember most of what was said.

Things I do know about the monastery:
- Symbol of royalty was St. John the Evangelist’s eagle under two lions facing each other
- Chains and shackles hang from the outside walls in remembrance of the Christians in Granada who were held captive by the moros (moors/arabs) during one of the wars. (this was really neat to learn because in some of the bars, we had seen shackles and chains on the wall but couldn’t comprehend why they were there)

And then we got back on the bus and drove two more hours to Madrid.

P.S. There was also a river in Toledo, I don’t remember what it was called, but it was rather pretty.

los molinos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=167083&id=536555856&l=2807b80e60