Córdoba

Córdoba was a must-see for me since I associate the city with Zoe's study abroad experience. So for our 4 day weekend, Annie, Tina, and I embarked on an epic journey from Madrid, which began with missing our bus at 9AM.

So we bought tickets for the next bus at 11AM. While we waited in the Estacion de Autobuses, I allotted 15 minutes for "sad time." Basically, we felt sorry for ourselves for missing the bus and talked about our depressing futures, but only for 15 minutes. After the 15 minutes were up, we had to be optimistic, which was kind of difficult once Tina and Annie realized they forgot to pack towels, adapters, and other stuff that just kept coming up.

Well, what do you get when you have 3 Asian girls who get motion sickness quite easily who don't know Spanish? A very upsetting 4 hour bus ride to Cordoba! We stopped at a rest stop, but of course, we didn't know that. We just followed everyone off the bus, which left us! After some intense eavesdropping, I found a couple who spoke English. They told me that we were in the outskirts of Cordoba. I started panicking because we were 30 km away from the center of the city! I couldn't believe that the bus would just drop us off in the middle of nowhere and expect us to get to the city like that! But, alas, the bus came back for us after taking a visit to the gas station next door.

And we arrived in Cordoba STARVING in the middle of siesta time, where all the kitchens were closed, and the weather was 40 degrees Celsius. WHOOHOO So we dropped our stuff off at Hotel Riviera, and wandered around in the heat.


Found this nice little area on the side of a huge wall.



I stood there for a second and wondered if Vatman could be related to Batman. Then I realized. VATMAN = BATMAN! (In Spanish, "V" is pronounced with a "b" sound.) I R SO SMART.

Then we noticed that there was this entryway, so we walked through. and BAM! in another world...

(Tina loves to take pictures of us walking. She thinks it's very candid. I'm ok with that because it's proof that I've been walking a lot.)

We were pretty desperate for food, so we ordered this:

Fried calamari, fried bream, and fried something-that-tastes-like-ham

We all felt like we didn't digest that until the next day. 

There were many cute little souvenir shops. While the girls were looking at accessories, I kept myself busy:

Hello Kitty - international nuisance

Wandered around and saw our first sight of the Mezquita!

So our photo-shoots began...

(more is on facebook ahha)

Then I saw these cute little girls and I just HAD to follow them (I actually wanted a picture with them)

We followed them to the Congress meeting place, but we were denied access. So we looked at these ceramics instead.

Then we walked back to our hotel and passed out. We're grandmas, but I like that :]