ZOE Adventures- Post #2

Buen día/tarde/noche wherever you may be,

We are now in Seville, preparing for Shabbat in our AirBnb that overlooks not only the cute narrow streets of Sevilla but also one of the biggest bullfighting rings of southern Spain.

In the past 5 days, we’ve been in 5 cities: Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba, Cadiz, and Seville. Since you can look on Wikipedia to learn the facts about these places and to see pictures, we will just focus on some of our adventures & misadventures in each of these places. 

Madrid:

Madrid was overall great and our non-shared AirBnb was quite a step up from Barcelona...or so we thought. When we returned to our apartment on our second day, we were overtaken by some stench. We’re convinced that the plumbing system of Spain has not been updated since the days of Ferdinand & Isabella because our bathroom—and therefore the whole small, nearly windowless apartment—wreaked of must and sewage. See? We really are roughing it on this post-college backpacking adventure.

Another highlight in Madrid (and all the cities we’ve 
been in for the past 5 days), is the abundance of Burger Kings. This might seem weird, given that we never eat at Burger King in the US, but the red, yellow, and blue logo has come to be a symbol of comfort for us. After seeing their specialty Oreo milkshakes advertised all over town, we decided we had to try one, and luckily there was a Burger King right around the corner from our Airbnb. Since then, by some miracle, anytime we are slightly hungry, a Burger King appears 1-3 minutes away. 

Toledo:

In preparation for Toledo, we read up on the city’s attractions, and one very informative blog told us that the highlight of her trip was “twirling in the streets of Toledo”. We had to give it a shot (see below)...while these photos did give us the opportunity to effectively use Live Photos, we think calling it a “highlight” may be an overstatement.

Our TRUE highlight was our discovery of an escalator system built into the mountains! Yes, we were equally as shocked as you, especially Olivia who, before seeing the escalators, declared, “Elisheva, you’re high if you think I’m climbing this”.

Olivia, truly her mother’s daughter, couldn’t resist initiating conversation with the woman next to her on the flight to Madrid. That woman (Rebecca) turned out to be the leader of a Spain-Israel trip for Russian-Americans, and the two became such close friends, that when we ran into them in Toledo, Rebecca offered Olivia and the rest of us to join the group. We declined, and then proceeded to run into them approximately 6 more times. Apparently Toledo isn’t that big.

Cordoba:

Cordoba’s biggest celebrity appearance in the past 20 centuries has been the Rambam (pictured below #celebspotting), and more generally there’s been a long history of Jews in the city, so we went to La Casa de Sefarad, the Jewish Museum there. The museum is interestingly not run by a Jewish group, and our tour 
guide too was not Jewish. He nonetheless had a really impressive knowledge of Jewish history and culture. So much so that, at the end of our tour, he told us that we would get to listen to some Jewish folk music to get a full understanding of the museum. We thought he would play some musical recording, but instead he unexpectedly started to belt “Yigdal Elohim Chai”, which took us by such surprise that we (read: just one of us) had to fake a coughing fit to cover up laughter. 

Our next Cordoba almost misadventure happened when we returned to the train station where we had gone earlier to drop our bags in storage. The storage lockers had been full, so we were told we could leave our bags behind a desk in some office. Hoping that this was something reasonably legit, and realizing that we didn’t really have an alternative, we took a leap of faith and left our bags. They gave us a receipt (so legit!) and told us we could pick it up all day, any time before “1 de la noche” (Spanish speakers: is that 1AM or 1PM?). When we returned, the office was closed and boarded up- of course, the office closed early because of the Corpus Christi holiday (bonus points if you know what this is, because we do not. Olivia thinks it’s called “Chris Christie”). We briefly debated if we wanted to sleep in the train station until 5AM when the office next opened (it was 5PM at the time) or if we should break in to the office. Instead, we found an information booth attendant who found a man in a yellow vest (maybe a security guard? Maybe a cleaning person? Maybe a random person who happened to have the office keys?) who opened the doors and let us take any bags we wanted. 

Cadiz:

Upon arriving in Cadiz, Zimi got pooped on by a bird for the second time in 2 weeks. Apparently that’s good luck- we’ll keep you updated. We then headed to the Cádiz Cathedral. Every time we’ve gone to church (it’s been a lot recently), we’ve been overwhelmed by all the paintings, sculptures, and statues. For some reason, Ramaz never taught us the difference between a chapel, a choir, a sepulcher, etc., so when our audio guides referred to those things, we always wished they explained some more so we could get a better 
understanding. The audio guide of the Cadiz Cathedral, though, had the opposite problem. It took us around to every single ornament and described seemingly every relevant and irrelevant detail. Ask us about 18th century architects in Andalucia or about the residents of the Cadiz Crypt! Lesson learned: be careful what you wish for, especially when you’re at church. 

Check out the beautiful view of the city from the bell tower!

Seville:

Our Seville adventures are just beginning, since we opted out of attending the bull fight yesterday. The Jewish community here is “on vacation” so we won’t have any interesting Chabad adventures to report, but we have some fun Shabbat-friendly activities planned for tomorrow.

Also, although we missed the Ramaz 5-year reunion in person, we are celebrating here, 6,000 miles away:

Shabbat shalom and thanks for reading!

Z.O.E.

(Zimi, Olivia, Elisheva)