Catching up: Cordoba

The street I lived on in Cordoba.

After the hubbub and grandeur of Granada, Cordoba was a little sleepy and boring, which I actually really enjoyed. It felt like I could see all it had to offer no matter how lazily I walked around (though man let me tell you, I tested that).

The day I arrived, I dropped my stuff, yanked a couple pages out of my Rick Steve’s guide (mostly about where the good food was), and walked down to the river (the same one as in Sevilla, the Guadalquivir). I saw the old Roman bridge there, which looked AWESOME at sunset. I took the obligatory pictures and walked along the water until I found a juice bar and coffee shop to set up shop in and read for a while. After that I kept wandering and realized I’d walked way farther than I intended. Mr. Steves had named his favorite restaurant in the city in the various pages I ripped out, but it sounded like it was much farther from my hostel than I felt like walking. Well ‘much farther’ was now suddenly ‘3 blocks that way’, so I decided to stay in the area until dinner. Thanks to Spanish meal times, that meant killing an hour, so I just got a drink at someplace nearby, which was a cross between a swanky cocktail lounge, a tourist restaurant, and nightclub.

Swanky.

When dinner time rolled around, I realized it had been almost 12 hours since I’d eaten jamon, so I basically just ordered that, bread, and ajo blanco (cold almond and garlic soup) for dinner. I also accidentally almost ordered an entire bottle of a local wine the guidebook said to try, as it wasn’t marked as a bottle and only cost 7 euros. Thankfully the waiter realized what I didn’t, cocked an eyebrow and said, ‘Un botella? Solo para usted? (A full bottle? Just for you?)’ then laughed when I went ‘uhhhh….no. un vino blanco por favor?’ I also got dessert (a brownie in cold chocolate soup; what is it with Spaniards and cold soup?), but the combination of salt from the ham and what I now believe to be a whole head of raw garlic in the soup had me feeling a little refluxy, so I figured finishing it was probably a bad idea. I paid, wandered home, and crashed pretty much immediately.

Jamon and the Soup of Too Much Garlic

The next morning I woke up, yawned, and from the utterly atrocious taste in my mouth realized exactly how much garlic had been in the soup the night before. After thoroughly scouring my teeth and tongue, I went to see the Mezquita, Cordobas take on the church-turned-mosque-turned-back-into-a-church trope of Andalucia. This one though was VERY clearly a former mosque, as the Muslim influence on the building had been much better preserved than the cathedral in the Sevilla. Part of the result of that was I kept getting turned around inside, as there wasn’t a very clear ‘front’ to the church. It didn’t help that the exit and entrance weren’t labelled and kept moving (No, seriously; they were doing some repairs and moved the exit and entry signs to various different doors while I was inside).

Mezquita interior

After I left I wandered a bit and found a store that specialized in the local version of sherry, so stopped and grabbed some to share with other folks at the hostel. The shop owner was nice and patient, and I think amused at the mishmash of Spanish that I knew and didn't know. I knew "denominacio de origen calificada," "pedro ximenez," "systema solera," and "moriles montida," but had to ask her to write out the price of something because I couldn't tell if she was saying 30 or 13. On the way home, I grabbed lunch at a taberna near the hostel, and once again asked myself why Americans have a reputation for eating unhealthy. I ordered a 'flamenquin,' which from the description sounded like a breaded pork cutlet. What it actually was was cured ham and bacon, rolled up in a flattened piece of pork, rolled into a tube, deep-fried and then served with a large blob of mayo. I made it halfway through then admitted defeat.

Un Flamenquin. Also known as 'the stick of pork.'

Back at the hostel I read for a bit, then went for a walk near the river. Cordoba has two main bridges (one left over from Roman times and a more modern one), so I crossed one, crossed back on the other, then had dinner on the river (and ate my first salad for the entire trip). I headed back to the hostel and shared some of the newly acquired dessert sherry (which was made from raisins and I SWEAR tasted like liquified fig newtons) with some girls who had arrived that day. Can't remember a single one of their names, but they were all in various stages of college, and were there to celebrate one of them having graduated. We went for a quick drink, though we only stayed for a round or two of beers before heading home. Again, how do restaurants in Spain function? I spend one and a half euros on two small beers and got two snacks for free. WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM.

Anyhoo, the next day I walked back to the train station and caught the AVE train to Madrid, which will be my next (and last!) post.