Consistency is a sticky thing. Ha, ha.
OK, so when last we met, I was about to explore Granada in the final Semana Santa post, but, we've come so far since then, you and I, let's just start where we are. All things past will weave their ways into what's to come.
So, the next most recent bit of low budget/high reward travel was a few weekends ago, when Gus and I invaded Toledo. This place is breathtaking in a very specific way. Like, when your medieval armor cuts off your circulation, the thunder and wind make you gasp with adrenaline, and the smell of incense and blood seems to rise up from the cobblestones. Oooh, and also marzipan. Toledo's just a 1/2 hour highspeed train trip from Madrid, and I think the fare was about 12 Euros. We spent a Friday afternoon, night and Saturday there, hosted by the parents of a former schoolmate and girlfriend Gus's, who was visiting her folks, and brought along her truly magnetic toddler son.
The old city, within the inner walls, is at least as steep, winding and cobbly as Granada, but without its openly sexy and gorgeous, gypsy-bellydance-harem Alhambra vibe. It's much more ominous and spooky (auto-da-fé, what's an auto-da-fé). Though predictably marred with logo-spammed US tourists, I really fell for the palpable old-school fear factor in the dark alleys and black wrought iron everything.
We did manage to slip out of the bus-bound crowds and into the labyrinth of confrontationally narrow streets full of defense-minded hard turns and dead ends. I was giddy to find that apparently local Spanish people actually still live in this medieval inner core, in near total peace and quiet, right around the corner from pure tourist mayhem. Toledo is totally the archetypal Spanish medieval city - those streets, the monstrously invasive and looming Catholicism, the suppressed but not eradicated Islam, the defeated but tenacious Judaism. It's got abundant dark beauty and also lots of spring flowers and vivid colors hanging from high places, to offset the gloomy danger vibe.
For a UNESCO World Heritage site, it's surprisingly loaded with graffiti, mostly just thousands of unattractive hodgepodge tags, but in some places that adds to the vibe of desecration in an improbably harmonious way.
It's so hard to find your way without a good map - we persisted in using the one in our Lonely Planet book, thinking since we only had a few total hours, why bother to buy one, getting lost is fun too. However, that means we didn't cover as many specific sites as we could have. But hey, you threatening-to-visit friends of mine, for the record, when you get to Madrid, definitely plan two days minimum for Toledo.
Looking back, back in time, to Granada, which I sadly haven't got many good photos of, the pleasure of walking there was entirely different yet, also entirely archetypal Spanish. M
ore light/bright than doom/gloom, what with that palace of let's get it on known as the Alhambra, there's more a snake charmer, bellydancer, tryst in the alley vibe here. This is probably going to make the only person from Granada that I know, laugh her little
culo off. But seriously, it's a sexy, winding, sinuous, delicious place with so much to see and do, and without more than maybe 2 or 3 hours there, all I can offer is that I cannot wait to return and have a better set of stories the next time I write about it.
Thanks for reading, and your comments, it's been an oddly difficult time lately, but having people cheer me on when I feel my progress flagging is invaluable.
Hasta luego!
No, seriously, I know I ought to just put up a proper F*ckr page or something for 'just photos'.
Anyway, here are a bunch of photos I've taken of street art and other sights, mostly in Tetuán. Some of these images have already been removed, painted over, etc. But new ones keep appearing.
