quick review of Cordoba and Sevilla

This past weekend I went to Cordoba and Sevilla with my CIEE group from Alcala, this was one of the two trips that we take as a group for the semester and was included in our program costs. We left Friday morning by bus and drove to Cordoba first. We arrived in Cordoba early afternoon and walked around the city a little bit getting a tour from one of our professors. This professor was our tour guide for the entire trip and it was insane how much information he knew about everything…It was literally like we bought a tour guide for everything and then some. Anyways we saw a little bit of the city and then went inside the mezquita which means mosque. It was really intricate and detailed and there was a lot of cool information that we learned about the building such as all the pillars inside (there were a ton) were all recycled from other roman buildings during the construction and for that reason every pillar was different. We spent a little while in there and then afterwards we had free time to wander around the city for an hour or two.

We then left Cordoba and went to Sevilla, arriving in Sevilla around dinner time…we checked into the hotel and then went out to dinner and wandered around the city for the rest of the night. I went out with one of the guys in my group (Eric) and we met up with two of his friends from back home and they showed us around a little bit. The night life in Sevilla was actually really neat and I felt like there were a lot of Spanish beauties there (which makes me a little angry I didn’t study there haha).

The next day we had another tour of Sevilla from our professor, we saw the cathedral of Sevilla – again very impressive – we also saw real alcazar which was an old palace of some sort with some really neat gardens and fountains. The tour around the center of the city and those two things took up pretty much all of our day and the rest of the time we had free to explore the city. We tried to go out to flamenco show and dinner – because Sevilla is one of the flamenco capitals of Spain – but the cheaper ones that we wanted to go to we either could not find, didn’t make it in time, or it was closed for the night, so we didn’t do that. Instead we just went out for a dinner and went to a bar to watch the Spain world cup qualifying match.

The next day we went to el parque de Maria Luisa, which was really big and had a lot of cool statues and gardens and other buildings. After that we went to la plaza de España, which is some law or government building, I can’t remember what exactly though. When we were done there we went back to the hotel prepared ourselves lunch and headed back to Alcala.

Valencia y las fallas

Again sorry this Blog is a little late…

Two weekends ago I went to Valencia for las fallas with a group of 8 other people from my CIEE program here in Alcala. Las fallas is a festival and the basic idea is that every community of Valencia builds a huge and very detailed float and then and then at midnight on the last night they burn all of the floats all over the city (this is obviously a very rough over view but I cant get into too much detail or that’s all I’ll be writing about, if you want to know more Google it…which I would recommend doing its quite interesting). I also wrote an essay in Spanish on this festival, so if any of you Spanish speakers want to read it to learn more just let me know. So we all went on Wednesday night (because we had a long weekend) and stayed in an apartment that was meant for 4. The apartment was actually really nice and we didn’t have too much trouble fitting all 9 of us in there which was awesome because we paid less that 20 euros a night each…you can tell I’m really starting to get good and being a cheap traveler. We arrived pretty late on wed night so we didn’t really do too much.

The next day we got up and walked towards the center of town and just explored on our way, we walked down many different streets because basically at every intersection and or plaza there was a falla. It was absolutely crazy to just turn the corner and there would be a 3 story tall float with all sorts of different things. When we got to the center of the city there was a mascletá which is a big firework show but in the middle of the day. Obviously since the show is in the middle of the day it’s not very much of a visual enjoyment but instead it’s extremely loud…when I say I extremely loud I mean that the windows of buildings and the ground shook as much as 5 to 10 blocks away. After the mascletá we continued to wander around the city looking at fallas, eating, watching street performers and just taking the whole experience in. We then went back to our apartment for a little bit and returned to the center for the night to watch la crema (the burning). During this whole time I forgot to mention that there are fireworks of many different types going off all over from firecrackers, m80s big mortars, fountains just everything…with that and live concerts it was loud pretty much everywhere you went.

La crema was really quite a scene they do a small firework show before they actually ignite each falla and the bigger the falla the more fireworks they did. We of course camped out in front of the biggest falla and saw a pretty intense and loud fireworks show. Then when it burned you could feel the heat from 100s of meters away (obviously because the fire was a few hundred feet in the air. During each burning they had multiple firefighters constantly spraying water on it to keep it in control but even with this they really got big. The rest of the night we just hung out in the center and enjoyed the atmosphere of the festival.

The next day we woke up and went to the beach of Valencia to relax and recuperate from the long day of fiesta before. We spent pretty much the entire day on the beach…I went for a run with the other guy that was there (Eric), we went for a little swim in the Mediterranean, listened to music and just relaxed. After the beach we went back to our apartment and decided to eat in so we went and bought pasta and one of the girls, Eric and I cooked dinner with freshly made garlic bread, pasta and some typical cheap Spanish wine.

The next day we did more of the tourist thing and saw some museums and such. We went to the aquarium which was kind of like a little bit smaller version of SeaWorld. At the aquarium we saw a dolphin show which was really neat and multiple other exhibits. We were there for most of the day, but after we were down we went to the science museum for a couple hours. The whole complex of the museums and aquarium is probably one of the coolest architectural things that I’ve ever seen in person and I took many pictures of it if you check out my facebook albums. After the museum we went back to our apartment to get ready to go out for dinner. We looked up a place that had dinner with a flamenco show and went there. Flamenco is the Spanish cultural dance, sort of like tango to Argentina. This was my first time seeing flamenco and it was really cool and the dinner was really good as well, so all in all it was a good final night in Valencia. The show wasn’t over until around 12:30 so we just went back to our apartment and hung out there before going to bed.

The next morning we woke up and went to the museum of las fallas to learn more about the fiesta. In the museum they also keep a portion of the best falla from every year so it was really neat to see how the architecture and designs changed over the years. After the museum we went straight to the bus station to head back to Madrid.

I think that this was probably one of my favorite trips that I’ve been on so far, due to the fact that we had the chance to experience a little bit of everything. The next weekend I went to Sevilla and Cordoba as part of the program here so that will be my next post. And as I am writing this it is the night before mom and dad come here to visit for my spring break, so that’s what I’ve been up to and will be up to for the next week and a half. Que pasáis bien, hasta luego.