I Love Mazes (that's a fact)

In the morning we woke up in Arcos de la Frontera. My parents went off on a little walk so my dad could show the city to my mom. Then we went straight to Sevilla, so as to see the Alcazar which was going to be closed the next day. The Alcazar is a humongous palace. We just parked our car and walked straight there because we did not have much time to visit it. We walked through the mudejar rooms that are like Moorish rooms but a bit different because they were built by Moorish people for the Spanish kings. We did not go to the other parts of the palaces.

Instead we went into the gardens. The gardens were awesome!!! They were humongous. It took me about five minutes to get lost in them! There was even a really really cool that was squashed but long and big. I played hide and seek with my mom The first time she found me. The second time I found her. But the third time she did not find me and she had to give up. By then it had been a really long time, so we had to come back and look for everybody else. We found them by the gift shop right at the exit. Then the Alcazar was closing so we had to leave. But I could have spent my whole life in that maze!

We had a late lunch in a super good restaurant near the cathedral, and also got some really good desserts. Then we got our luggage from the car and went to the hotel. My mom had to go on a business trip so my dad took her to the airport and came back. We stayed in the hotel for a while. In the evening, we took a taxi to a tapas bar to have a quick meal, then walked straight to a flamenco dancing place that we heard was really good. It was OK, but I got really bored half way through. Then we returned to the hotel and went to bed.

The next morning we walked around the barrio Santa Cruz, which is an old Jewish neighborhood. We stopped at a bar to go to the bathroom and get something to drink. Then we went to the cathedral. On the way I climbed up street poles, and I timed myself: my best time was 6 seconds. You don't need to know that but I felt like saying it:-) The line for the cathedral was really long, so we left and came back, and finally visited it. I personally thought it was quite boring but my dad thought it was cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was that we got to go all the way up the Giralda, which is a super tall tower from which you can see the whole city. Unfortunately, we had to go up 37 steep ramps to get there.

Then we walked to a very small palace, called Palacio de Pilatos, that is also a mudejar palace. Right as we went in, it had a very big area with nothing in it. On the right, there was a large patio with a fountain in the middle, and columns on all sides with rooms going off of them. There was one other patio that had a bunch of really nice sculptures. Most mudejar walls have azulejos on them, which are little colored tiles. And this palace had lots of them. Most of the rooms off the main patio led to gardens that I did not really like. One thing that was in the bathroom was a sculpture of the bust of Julius Cesar. I don't know why the heck it was in the bathroom, but it just was...

We went back to the hotel, got our bags, and had to get really quickly to the bus. We made it to the bus just in time, then went to the airport, and flew back home to Barcelona.

The Devil for a Guard

After leaving Cordoba we drove to Medina Azahara, which is the old palace of the calife, that is the old Moorish king. I thought the palace was really cool, but what was even more fun was that the palace was like a maze and I lost my dad in it. The only two times that I did bad things the guard happened to be watching me, and he yelled at me twice. He almost kicked us out. What's wrong with running and not having parents with you every second, really? You'd think he likes getting kids in trouble!!! Then I needed to go to the bathroom again, but there was an enormous line ahead of us of older people jeering and telling each other to go into the same bathroom with another person of different sex. It was absolutely disgusting. And, I was desperate.

Then we left, and kept on driving until we found a room in Osuna. We walked around town and saw a pretty plaza. For dinner the hotel that we went to had a restaurant, but we did not want to eat there. My dad asked at the hotel for directions to the area of another restaurant, the lady asked why, so my dad said we were visiting a friend, then she asked for his name, and my dad said Fernando Rodriguez Marquez. Of course that was all made up because we don't have any friends named Fernando Rodriguez Marquez. It was not actually very useful though, because when we walked over to the other restaurant it was closed. So we went back to the hotel and ate dinner there. The dinner was actually super good. In the morning we also had a really good breakfast there.

The next morning we went to Ronda. When we got to Ronda, we walked around for a bit and had lunch at a parador (don't ask me what that means) that had a really good view of the cliffs, which Lindsay and I call the Cliffs of Insanity II because we already saw the Cliffs of Insanity I in Arcos. Ronda is built at the top of a ludicrously high cliff. Because of the cliffs, there are two parts two the city, and a very big bridge connecting them. And there is at least a thousand foot drop in the middle. At the bottom we could see a really old water mill. There was also a dried up lake. Then we walked around for a really long time, planning to go to a museum, but when we got there it was closed. On the way back we stopped to two ice cream places. I did not get anything at the first place, and at the second place I got some banana ice cream with nuts on it that I was just trying out for the sake of it, and that I thought was really horrible.

After that, we decided to spend the rest of the day into the white pueblos. I wanted to get out and do something so we stopped at some rocks. Behind them, in the middle of nowhere, we found a really old Roman road, and we also found big slabs of granite and marble. We could not find any place to stay for the night so we drove all the way to Arcos de la Frontera and stayed there, so my mom could see the town since she was not with us the first time around.

Nose Spray

We left Granada right after lunch on our way to Cordoba. First we stopped at Alcala la Reale, which has a nice castle, but the castle was closed. Then we went to Almedinilla to visit a Roman villa which was also closed. Then we went to Priego de Cordoba just to look at the nice Renaissance buildings but everything there was also closed at the time when we were there, and we could not wait long enough. Finally, when we got to Cordoba, we just had a nice dinner at a restaurant and went to sleep.

In the morning the first thing we did was go to the Mezquita, which is an old Moorish mosque that is really pretty. It has at least one hundred arches on the inside. The Mezquita has a very very large patio with trees, and also a lot of pigeons. My brother and I started to throw bread for them, then we started throwing bread at them, then I unleashed the beast (that's my brother) to chase them away. As you can see from the picture, he can even hunt them with his eyes closed...

We walked around the Juderia, which is the old district around the Mezquita. We went to an old Jewish synagogue that was very small. We went to a very old Jewish house that had been turned into a museum, and I almost fell into the well, because I thought it was only a pot and I bent into it all the way until I discovered it was a very deep well. I was so surprised I almost fell into it. Then we went into another old Jewish mansion with two wells and an old passage around the back with a pretty fountain. It also had paintings of people who had lived in the Juderia long ago.

Then we rented a horse and carriage and drove around in it. My ear was still hurting a lot and had not gotten better, so we went to the hospital to see what was wrong with it. We found out that I had an ear infection, and I had to take a bunch of medication every day for over a week. But the worst of it was a kind of watery spray I had to put up my nose five times a day for a week. And because I loved it in Andalucia another bad thing was that I was still probably good enough to take the plane back and go to school the following Tuesday.

We went to lunch in a really good tapas bar. Then we got our bags from the hotel and left because we couldn't find a room for another night in Cordoba.