In just about every city in Spain, there was a fantastic cathedral to be explored and photographed. There were more than we had time for, but here are some of my favourites. Starting with Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, pictured above. Just opposite the royal palace in Madrid, Almudena is a clean neoclassical cathedral, a sort that doesn’t normally get me to excited. However, the placement at the far end of the palance court yard allow for every open views of the facade, which made for some powerful contrasting shows in the afternoon sun.

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Toledo is a wonderfully old town perched on top of a hill about 45 minutes bus from Madrid. The whole of the old town is a UNISCO world heritage site, and as you walk through the twisted streets loaded with history from the Romans, through Islamic rule, a large populations of Sephardi Jews, and eventually to Catholic conquest. It feels like a truly old city, in a way that you just can’t feel in bigger cities. It almost feels like they have more old buildings than they know what to do with. For example, we stayed on the hill across from the main town (view from our hotel is above) in an old castle. Rather than being refurbished as a tourist site, it had been converted into a youth hostel.

Among the twisted cobbled streets and buildings that have been a mosques, synagogue, and church at various points in history, there are two very popular items for sale:

The first are swords. Nearly every store had a sword display, even if it was primarily a bakery. Other than one antique shop we walked into, I don’t think I saw a single unique sword in the whole lot. Ever store had the same set of swords representing a variety of famous types of swords from different cultures throughout history. Even though they were generic, they were shiny, and there was a little bit of the boy in me that wanted one and contemplated the logistics of bringing a sword home.

The second item was marzipan. Crafted into any shape or size you could imagine: marzipan cakes, fruits, logs, flowers, sushi, and animals. You name it, they made it out of marzipan (yes they had marzipan swords). Slightly less expensive and less logistically difficult than a sword, we managed to tuck into a few of these little treats as we wandered around the town.

What startled me most about the proliferation of marzipan and sword shops was how they could stay in business. From the front window of most marzipan and sword stores, you could see another store selling the exact same set of goods. They were even more prolific than rubbish bins or benches to sit on. I would wager that there are most sword stores than traffic lights in Toledo. Maybe by as many as two-to-one. It’s staggering. But, somehow they do survive and thrive, becoming a tourist sight in their own right.

Supposedly Spain’s economy is a poor shape, but you couldn’t really tell from the Spanish Christmas season. We arrived about a week before Christmas, and the whole week, if it wasn’t raining, people were shopping. One night out in Madrid we were caught in an absolute crush around 10 at night, it was a great festive crowd of holiday hats and blinking lights all around.

One of the favourite things for which people were shopping were the massively elaborate nativity scenes. You can see a selection of the baby Jesuses from one of the stalls below. There where whole markets of this sort of thing, including little animated statues so you could build a full and lively Bethlehem.

And at just about every turn, someone had made a little nativity scene. Every now and again, they’d made a very large one. The picture below is one of the main squares in Ubeda, which had been transformed into a giant nativity scene, with a petting zoo, mannequin Mary and Joseph, and people cooking over an open fire. Certainly the largest nativity scene I have ever seen.

I love food, so it’s often a key part of my adventures. In Spain, before I even got to the food, I encountered the ingredients. Up front in most restaurants and in every market were proud displays of what would be going into your next meal. I really enjoyed this type of display as it insured me of the quality of the ingredients, and also let my cooking mind dream just I would make with the meats and other treats on display long before even looking at the menu.

I’m back from a delightful 3 week jaunt around Spain. Ilana and I started in Madrid and took short trips out to Toledo and Salamanca before heading south to Seville. There, we met up with our flatmate Alina, and hired a car to drive around Andalucia, staying in Granada, Cordoba, Ronda, and Ubeda. We then headed over to the east coast and wrapped up our trip with Valencia and Barcelona.

I’m not going to chronicle the journey step my step, but I’ll blog up some of my favourite (and least favourite) impressions from the journey. The first impression was, of course, the weather. Eliza Doolittle’s old line about the rain in Spain staying mainly in the plain is utter bullocks. There was plenty of rain everywhere. We would get a temporary reprieve every now and then, but we also got good and wet a few times. The picture above is one of those times, as Ilana and Alina hide from the rain under a small overhang.

In terms of chronicling the trip, I may not have blogged while on the road, but I think I took more high quality pictures on this trip than I have on any other in the past. If you are keen, you can take a gander through the entire collection of them on Flickr. I hope you enjoy them, I sure had fun taking them.