The Best Little Hotel in Córdoba

There are a few more memories of Granada I should mention before moving on - the tagine we ate in a little Moroccan restaurant hidden in the alleys of the Albaicín district, the famous Cassata wedge-of-ice-cream from the Los Italianos Heladería, walking up the hills at night and stumbling on wide plazas overlooking the Alhambra.  Honestly though, mostly I think about the tagine - it was maybe in my top five best foods I've ever had in my life.  And it was our final send-off meal before we took a mid-morning train the next day to Córdoba, our last stop in Andalusia.

Typically, Paul and I alternate years for our anniversaries.  Spain was "my year" so I had made a special effort in my planning to make sure our one night in Córdoba would be super romantic.  I decided to go all in and found us the nicest hotel close to the Mezquita - the Balcón de Córdoba - and because it was the nicest hotel close to the Mezquita, I reserved the very tiniest room.  For extra fancy to offset the tiny, I added a couple of their little "extras" (mostly because I'd never done that kind of thing before).  So I ordered some rose petals (romaaaaaantico) and a piece of cake (...pregnant...) to be there when we arrived.

Feeling a little silly about it all, I wrote a long note in the comments box trying to explain how it was our anniversary and the last one we were having before I was having a baby and I was really pregnant (so...cake) and it's okay if you don't have rose petals and we'll be there around 3pm and is there a chance this room possibly has a bathtub instead of just a shower and I'm only asking because in Denmark there are no bathtubs and we miss taking nice baths and rambling rambling self-conscious ramble.  I hit Send and didn't think much about it after that.

Fast forward to our train arriving in Córdoba.

We picked up our trusty orange backpacks and set off down the greenway for our thirty minute walk into the old city, reading through our Rick Steve's guide to Spain and the Córdoba city tour along the way.  With all the hype I'd put around Granada, I hadn't realized how interesting Córdoba was going to be!  It was where we first starting reading about the emperor Hadrian and how he had been born very nearby - it's no coincidence that our lovely and fascinating short time in Córdoba led to us later name our little traveling fetus Hadrian three months later.

The old city walls were such a surprise and particularly impressive - dating back to 200 B.C. - and were the second oldest structure we saw in all our Euro travels!  

Once we made it into the historic city, we could see so many layers of history and religion - wandering through Jewish, Arabic, Christian, and Roman streets and eras and buildings and art just like it was the most normal thing in the world.

But all of that detail is for another post.  The real story here is about the Balcón de Córdoba of course!

We found the entrance just around the corner from the Mezquita complex - a modern glass door that looked hewn out of a stone wall.  Three steps in and we were in an open courtyard with a beautiful orange tree shading a garden and fountain.  Three more steps in and we were practically run-over by the most kind and polite person I've ever encountered at any moment in my life for any service or transaction or anything. 

The first words out of his mouth, in perfect English, were "We've been waiting for youuuuuuu!"  And in seconds Paul and I, looking a little silly with our utilitarian neon-orange backpacks and regular-person clothes in such a fancy place, were simply wrapped up in ultra-hospitality.  Before I knew it, I was sitting in a cushy chair at his check-in desk, holding a goblet of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and our backpacks had been whisked away. 

He (I wish I remembered his name!  I'm going to call him Julio.)...Julio made all the usually boring parts of checking in fly by in a second and then stood up with a huge smile and said, "We've all been so excited for your surprise!"  (I hope it's not...an expensive...surprise...I thought.)  As we walked up the stairs, Julio talked about the history of the building, the Roman artifacts just casually sitting in corners.  Since I always do my research, I knew the names of the little rooms, but we kept passing one and then another.  Julio, being Julio, could probably see that I was getting confused/nervous, and he gave us a huge grin and told us how the staff had read my note about me being pregnant and it being our anniversary and all, and they had decided to upgrade us to their nicest room as a congratulations present!

And guys, it was a really....reaaaally nice room.  It was basically the penthouse.  And they had even remembered the rose petals and cake.

They had given us the room that was THE Balcón of the Balcón de Córdoba - with even an outdoor bed overlooking the mosque and the old city below.  In the early morning, before dawn, I woke up from our indoor bed, wrapped a thin blanket around me, and went out to look up at the stars.  Before I knew it, I'd fallen asleep and woke up to the sound of a beautiful call to prayer as the sun was just beginning to rise.  

We ate our breakfast in the courtyard garden and then came back up to our suite for the rest of the morning, maxing out our pre-check-out time on our two balconies.

And, of course, taking a couple relaxing jacuzzi baths.

  

A Ridiculously Long Post about the Alhambra with a Million Pictures

Let's talk about the Alhambra!

Boringly described, it's a palace and fortress complex on the top of a hill/small-mountain in the middle of Granada, Spain.

More interestingly, the famous palace is nearly 700 years old, was the royal court of the Sultans of Andalucia, then, after the reconquista, became the royal court for the queens and kings of Spain.  Columbus got his official "okay, we'll give you money to go 'find India'" from this palace.  Queen Catharine (later the divorced wife of Henry VIII) grew up there.  It gradually got forgotten over centuries and in Napoleon's time was just a place for squatters, but then word started to get around that there was an amazing palace hidden on the hill in Granada.  Washington Irving actually went and lived in it for a while, writing Tales of the Alhambra.  It basically became the hipster-cool place to go in the 19th century and now it's the most visited place in Spain. 

Here's the thing about the Alhambra - when you're there, your eyes are so overwhelmed by all the detail that your brain can't actually handle it.  You see it, but after about 4.2 seconds, you stop being able to look at everything.  The plaster work is ridiculously gorgeous and detailed.  It's only in looking at these pictures later that I can start to see it again.  

Plus, imagine that quite a lot of this plaster work was also painted in blues, yellows, and reds so it would have been even more overwhelming.

But even with so much overwhelming detail, the most impressive thing is that nothing felt out of balance - that even with every inch covered in designs, it still managed to look clean and orderly.

The generally-agreed-upon climax of the Alhambra is the Court of the Lions.  It's a place where it's impossible to notice everything beautiful - but we at least tried to take pictures!  Even though we had such a specific window of time we were allowed to be there, we took every minute to soak it in.  It was, after all, one of my life bucket-list places-to-see.

Seriously, how did they design and do this??

I mean, COME ON!

There are other parts of the Alhambra complex we could talk about - like the Palace of Charles V (yawn), the Citadel (cool in a castley-forty kind of way?), the Generalife Gardens (I always love me some gardens!)...but the point of it all was always the Alhambra.  This Nazarid jewel, as the experts say, uniquely untouched by the popular Byzantine styles of its era - simply the greatest example of beauty that came out of the height of Moorish culture.  It was, to me, the highlight of the trip and in my Top 5 Places from our European travels - which is saying quite a lot.

Sevilla, Part II: Cathedral and the Alcazar

Did you know that the third largest cathedral in the world is in Seville?  Did you know that Game of Thrones filmed their Dorne scenes in Seville?  Equally fascinating facts.  ;-)

After our first, lovely night in Seville and sleeping in a bit in the morning (I loved how, to keep things cool, you could close solid wood shutters over every window and make the room completely dark.) we set off to see the cathedral.  THE CATHEDRAL.

It's gigantic and ornate and has roman columns all around the outside that are pretty much just traffic barriers (because that's how Europe works.  Roman columns are just lyin' around.)

 
It's also kind of a hodge-podge of architecture because, so the story goes, Seville started building their cathedral and then kept hearing about other cathedrals that were going to be bigger...so they just kept adding parts to it.  Hilarious.  And how you get things like these elaborate flying buttresses.

I also remember that Christopher Columbus is buried in there.  So...history.  And...not...nice...history.

But my favorite part was walking through the orange tree courtyard on the way out.  You had to be careful to not trip on one of those irrigation canals running gorgeously throughout the whole place, but it was a little piece of cool, shaded, Moorish loveliness.  And a fantastic intro to Andalusian history - the medieval Christian seamlessly integrated with the Islamic.    Love it.  LOVE IT.  Also those little geometric channels and those arches behind the fountain there reminded me of Topkapi Palace in Istabul.  I loved seeing how cultures interconnected over centuries in ways that we typically don't learn about in our European History classes here in the states.  We owe so much to those Moors.

Then we walked across the square to the royal palace aka the Alcazar - a place I didn't even know about before we went to Seville.  And it was amazing.  Look at this courtyard.  LOOK!  LOOOOOK!  Look at the Moorish first floor with the orange trees.  And then the Roman second floor!  It was so so beautiful.  And, here's my Game of Thrones moment: the Gardens there are the "Water Gardens of Dorne."  So it was funny to watch that episode with all those assassins runnin' around in the exact place I was runnin' around trying to find the bathroom.

And then we went to a Flamenco performance that evening.  Wow.  I "knew" what it was but I didn't know.  I think I could feel Hadrian jumping and dancing inside me everytime they started their stomping and castanets.  There was a lot of sweat flying.  There was a grown man playing the guitar and sobbing his eyeballs out.  There was a lot of passion in that room.  I'll never forget it.  Flamenco!

We went straight into a castanet store afterward and got a pair as our souvenir. I actually figured out how to use them for about ten seconds one time.  It was very exciting.  One of my life goals is to be able to castanet like a boss.

SEVILLE!

Sevilla, Part 1: The Long Journey

When we first moved to Europe, we made a prioritized list of places we wanted to see.  Most of them were shared, like Paris, London, Rome...you know, the big ones.  But there were a couple surprises.  Paul really wanted to go to Norway, which had not been on my radar at all.  And me?  I wanted to go to Andalucia in Spain.

It just sounded so romantic.  Andaluuuuuusia.  Or, AndaluSEEEEaaaah.  However you wanted to go with that.  Plus, I'd dreamt about seeing the Alhambra since 9th grade when I first really got into Moorish history and culture.  I wanted the orange trees, the fountains in the inner courtyard gardens, the intricate arches and arabic calligraphy.  The spices, the seafood, the heat, the olives.  Spain!   Right?

So Spain was where we spent our 6th anniversary and our last adventure together before Hadrian arrived.  And I should add, was a big reason why we named him Hadrian in the first place.  Andalucia was the historical Hadrian's homeland, so to speak, and learning about the Roman influence in the area was a fascinating surprise for me.  

Anyway!  I'm sure you're here to learn about Sevilla/Seville and not to hear me wax rhapsodic about my dreams of southern Spain.  On we go then!

My first impression of Spain was Madrid, actually.  It was much cheaper to fly from Copenhagen to Madrid and then take the bullet train down to Seville.  I remember seeing the dry, high-desert surrounding the city from the plane, worrying a little bit about catching our train since we had to take a bus through rush hour traffic.  I remember people on the bus acting very alarmed when I got on, seven months pregnant with a stuffed bright orange backpack and waving aside people's concerned pleas for me to just take their seat!  

Side note: it wasn't that I didn't want their seat or didn't appreciate it.  Honestly, I kept turning them down because I was having trouble processing why so many people were suddenly acting so extremely deferential.  I felt shy and embarrassed to be singled out, I guess?  (I'm healthy and young and strong!  I don't need your seat, Mr. 65 Year Old Man!)  I think this was because, surprisingly, in Denmark no one treated my massive pregnant self with much deference - as I commuted by bike, bus, and train almost every day to Copenhagen.  So I wasn't used to it?  Plus, I think the Danish attitude had made me think that I must not have looked very pregnant.  ha ha.  I looked at the Spain pictures when we got home and was like, "HOLY moly I was big!"  So...yep. Denial.  Anyway, the point is that people in Spain were waaaaay more conscientious about pregnant women than I'd ever seen in my life.  Kudos to Spain.)

I remember us running (well, Paul running.  Me kind of sad-waddling after him) around the massive train station trying to find our track...or just the place where there were any tracks!  What was a bit disconcerting was seeing so many fully armed - we're talking armored vests and AK-47 - police just walking around (there was an echo of that when we went to Paris a few months before with my parents and sister.  Fully armed police all over the train stations...).  Plus the fact that we had to go through security and a metal detector to even get to our track!  Only in Spain did we come up against that.  It was actually the reason we were so lost in the train station - kept thinking, "Oh, well we don't want to go through that massive line to wherever!  We just want to find the tracks!"  

Let me just say here that the bullet train to southern Spain is posh.  Maybe the nicest train we've ever been on.  And a surreal experience to watch "Jack the Giant Killer" dubbed in Spanish.  Like...all the characters were named "Julio" and "Esparanza" or along those lines...but it was clearly set in England?  

Then we made it to Seville!

Aaaaaaaand had to take a taxi to get to the historic city center.  It's always strange for me when the train stations aren't just smack dab in the middle of the action, but that's the way it was in Seville.  Be prepared. You're going to pass a lot of mid-century apartment buildings before you see medieval streets.

Finally, we were dropped off next to the Cathedral and began our wander through some of the most interesting and get-lost-able streets and alleys we ever encountered in Europe.  I think Venice and maybe the Alfama in Lisbon could match or beat it.  Every now and then, the space would suddenly open up into lovely little squares with statues, fountains, and shaded by orange trees.

I was SO HUGE.  I am a travel ROCK STAR!

This was our "local square" just a couple turns away from our vacation apartment.  Our first night in Seville, we ate our first real paella at the seafood restaurant in the back there, with the white awning.  I remember a man sitting near the fountain, playing classical guitar and noticing the grey and white pebble patterns on the walkways as we ate.  I was so tired - it had been a long day with a lot of walking, but I was also jazzed to realize that I'd made it.  After dreaming about seeing this region of the world since I was 13 years old - here I was!  Eating legit chorizo in a gorgeous saffron paella, sitting across from a handsome man who actually married me, and seven months pregnant with my son.  Smelling roses and hearing that Spanish guitar, first night in Seville under the stars.

Norway: Surpriiiiiise!

One random Friday in August 2014, Paul came home from work expecting a nice weekend of grocery shopping, sleeping in, and streaming old episodes of The Amazing Race.

EXCEPT!

When he turned from the hallway to the living room, he saw me standing there with our travel backpacks and the most insane grin on my face that could possibly be created with my face muscles.  And I said,
    "Paul!  Pack your bag because we're goin' to NORWAY!"

And he just stood there...

And said, "....what?"

"Norway!  Right now!  We are going to Norway in literally ten minutes!"

Let me make this shorter than it could be and just sum up by saying that it didn't really seem to fully sink in for him until after we had actually landed in Bergen.   Which, you know, was pretty funny.  And also confusing.  Because I was like NORWAY NORWAY NORWAY! and he was like ::wide eye confusion silence shock::

The thing was that Paul had always told me about how he'd always wanted to see Norwegian fjords and that, since I was pretty pregnant by then, that we most likely would never get up there before we had to move away.

Well.  Challenge Accepted!

We went to Bergen for the weekend and pulled one long, all-day fjord tour on Saturday through Norway-In-A-Day (highly recommended).  And it was just a blast.  Even moreso for me because I love orchestrating surprises and I'd rank an international vacation pretty high for coolest possible surprise.

Our trip, because it was so short and dependent on a tour company was a bit more touristy than we were used to on our trips - Bergen, being a cruise port, meant there were a lot of older North Americans roaming the streets in camera'd packs but it had a lot going for it.  I especially loved staying so close to the harbor and walking around the old, wooden 19th century neighborhood, Bryggen.

The next day on the trains, ferries, and busses through the fjords was super great and exhausting and amazing and everything.  By that point, Paul was finally understanding that, yes, we were actually in real Norway and was really excited.  I feel like I'm writing too many words like "amazing" and "excited" and it doesn't say what I meant to say but I'm trying to write this really fast while Hadrian is asleep and I have a cold so my vocabulary isn't, shall we say, at its finest.  BUT I just wanted to say that it was all worth it.  It was so worth it.  It's always worth it to travel.

So, I guess, if you're a person who thinks all the time about how they wish they could go somewhere but "I can't right now" then...well, maybe that's true.  But first make sure about that.  Is it absolutely true?  Could you do it?  Are you just saying you can't because it seems like it would take too much preparation or time or you don't know if spending your money is the right choice?  Well...I can't really say what your experience would be, but we're pretty conservative people - financially, time-wise, prep-wise.  And we have never regretted any of our adventures for a second.  Money is just money, but what's most important are memories.

That's why we went to Norway for a weekend.  Because we could.  (And for the SURPRISE!)

 

Leaving Skye and Scotland

The next two days we saw a bunch of amazing things on Skye.  The Quirang (above), the cliffs at Kilt Rock, the Fairy Pools, the harbor at Portree, and the McCleod clan castle.  On one drive we stopped into a rebuilt Hebridean village at the north of the island, looking out across to the Isle of Harris.

It was all too much.  Too much to try and talk about everything.  Just to say that it was beautiful and we finally found a McArthur scarf on our very last day on the island and practically in Scotland in a tiny shop in Portree.  Woohoo!

The day we left Skye, we took the long road back toward the east and center of Scotland where we had not been before, making a loop past Loch Ness (you just have to) and down to Pitlochry where we stayed for one last night before driving back to Edinburgh in the morning to catch our plane.

It wasn't until our last night in Pitlochry that we actually. and finally, tried haggis.  And I have to say, I was impressed.

As I was with pretty much all of Scotland.  We'll be back.