¡Listo!

Passport control in airports is heinous all over the globe.  I'm sure it's especially heinous getting into the US, however necessary it is.  One great thing about the European Union is that it essentially renders all borders between nations as moot, at least in economic, social, and educational affairs.  Politically, the nations are still nations, as they should be.  However, tariffs don't really exist in the EU, which is something that strong borders would bring, nor are there any rules for traveling in and out of certain countries.

When my parents were here and we were all visiting Madrid, we decided it would be a good idea to get out of the city and go to another town called Toledo.  It's only a 30 minute train ride from Madrid to Toledo (and it goes especially quickly when traveling on the AVE, something like 250 km/h!), which makes it a day-trip hot-spot for city-dwellers and tourists alike.

Toledo seems like a smaller city at first glance, but it is the capital of its own province, and also the capital of the larger autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha.  (By the way, La Mancha is where Don Quixote had his famous fight with the windmill-giants.)  So it's still pretty large.  The historical center of town is easy to explore in a day's worth.  Toledo sits on a hill, surrounded on nearly three sides by el Río Tajo (or the Tagus, in its anglicized version) and overlooks a beautiful countryside full of "mountain" homes and smaller villages.  It's really one of the most beautiful places I've been so far.  It's a regular, old city on a hill!

When we got there, we went into the center of town, taking one of the several possible bus routes.  Yet we still managed to get off at the wrong stop.  We went into a local tourist office and got the necessary items: a map, a list of attractions, etc.  And although there was a battle reenactment going on that day we were there, we had already pretty much decided where we were going to go and what we were going to see: La Catedral de Toledo and the El Greco museum.

Toledo is very hilly, yet somehow incredibly compact at the same time.  We snaked our way through buildings and alleys and such until finally we found where we were supposed to be going to La Catedral.  The town was pretty much empty while we were making our way through it, but once we got to the plaza outside the cathedral, suddenly we ran into everyone!  Evidently, there was some kind of exposition of old cars that was going on.  And if we weren't on such a tight schedule, we may have stopped to check it out a bit more.  But we were kind of in a hurry.  (We were also approached by a man several times who told us to go check out this artisan-works that he and his buddies had put together, and after nicely telling him we'd think about it, we ran into him three more times before we had to say goodbye.)

Onto the cathedral.  I don't know if I mentioned in my post about Sevilla's cathedral, but the cathedral of Toledo at one point in time kind of had a running competition to outdo Sevilla's.  Sevilla's is, of course, bigger in general (with seven naves to combat with Toledo's five and an accompanying tower that was once the tallest in the Western world), but the competition itself had to do with their retablos, which are the golden statue-murals that are fixed behind the main altar.  Rumor has it that row upon row was built in each cathedral until one couldn't go anymore, with Sevilla eventually becoming the victor in that contest.  All I can say is, Toledo-ans are very, very proud of their cathedral, as they should be.  In most ways, theirs is so much prettier than Sevilla's, even though Sevilla's may be more magnificent.  Sevilla's was built in a Gothic style, so it's a lot less colorful and ornate on the inside, whereas Toledo's was built in more of a Neoclassical/Renaissance style.  It featured a lot more color and ornate structure than Sevilla's.  Though, I have to say, Sevilla's retablo is still more impressive.  Here are some pics:



After that, we shopped in the gift shop for awhile and made our way out (past the artisan that tried to get us to go see his friends' works) and towards the Greco museum.  On our way there, we got to take some pictures of the river valley in all its splendor and beauty:



The museum of El Greco was a bit of a misnomer.  Yes, it houses El Greco's paintings, or a small fraction of them, but we were led to believe that it was the house that he once lived in.  Evidently, the man who bought the house was under the same impression.  The truth is, no one knows where the famous painter lived in Toledo, so even though it might not have been his house we were walking through, the owner decided to refurbish it to look like what El Greco's house would have looked like.  Quite ingenious, but still a little bit of a letdown.  What wasn't a letdown, though, was the artwork.  I, personally, love El Greco.  I love him because he broke rules.  (My señora hates him for the very same reason.)  I love the way he plays with light and texture, making all his colors vibrant or muted, depending on what he's using them for.  El Greco did a lot of portraits, but he did them in a very unique way.  Instead of following the methodology of the era, he decided to disfigure his subjects, making their faces and fingers longer and less human, which ironically makes them seem more real, albeit still very stylistic.  Here are some examples:



Afterwards, we found a nice place to eat lunch and had some local dishes.  That's the other thing that's very interesting about Spain.  In America, yes, we have regional cuisine (and in Italy, too, as we would find out later, on another trip), but it's so widespread that you can get anything anywhere, usually.  Maybe not anything, but a lot of things.  (We're also more adventuresome, in terms of ethnic food.  Spaniards?  Not so much.)  So we didn't recognize a lot of things on the menu at this Toledo restaurant.  More have we seen marzipan (mazapán) anywhere else in Spain because it's a specialty of Toledo.  The same thing happened in Cádiz and even in Barcelona, though we didn't really eat out that much there.  So that's a difference I didn't expect.  Of course, you'll say that you can't get authentic New England Clam Chowder in the South, nor can you get Carolina Barbecue anywhere but in North Carolina.  But I say you can, it's just not the same.  In Spain, it's hard to find specialties of other places anywhere.  Spaniards like what they like.  That's just it.

Anyway, after that, it was time to head back to the station.  We were still going to try to get back to Madrid with enough time to see some things.  We did make one more stop by a really old bridge, though.  And let me tell you, that was the most beautiful part of the entire city.  The river, the countryside, and the city were also right next to each other and you could really see the "city on a hill" that was Toledo.



Pictures don't really do it justice.