Espana

Well, I've been in Toledo for the past few days now and I really like it! It is very pretty. The only thing I don't like is that the city has like seven hills in it and they are very tiresome to walk down. And I'm getting worried about money again :( I have spent about $300 so far and I have only been here for 9 days! We are leaving to go to another city in a couple days, and I am planning on buying food from a supermarket there so I don't have to eat out every meal because it is freaking expensive here. AND the stupid engineering department at school hasn't posted any of the engineering scholarships yet that they were supposed to have done by APRIL. I'm very upset about this because I kind of need that money! It would just make me feel better knowing I have it.

Anyway, today was our second day of classes. It's not that bad yet, but I have a lot of reviewing to do tonight becasue I haven't taken any concrete classes before and there is some stuff that I need to know. After class, we went to tour the big cathedral of Toledo. Toledo is actually a very old city and it has so much history. The cathedral is special becasue it was built on top of a mosque which was Muslim I think... then the Catholics took over, and then someone else took over and now it is Catholic again. At least thats what I think that she was saying. So since there were so many different types of religions in this church, there are a lot of different styles of architecture there. There was this one little chapel that had this white rock in it that is aparently the oldest stone in the church, and legend says that when the priest or whoever was head of the church at that time was there, he defended the virgin Mary a lot because not everyone thought she was telling the truth about the virgin birth and so as a thank you, Mary came down from heaven and stood on this stone and blessed it or something. So for Catholics (or anyone else that wants to) they can go there and rub the stone while making a wish and reading a special prayer that is on the wall, and their wish will come true. I thought that this was interesting.

After the Cathedral, we went to see the Jewish Quarter of the city, which was pretty cool as well. I took a few pictures of that. Also we went to go see the oldest mosque in the city. I especially liked this one because the outside of the building you can clearly tell where the mosque was added onto. Origionally it was a muslim mosque, and then when the christians took over, they added the left hand side of the mosque in their own style. It is really neat looking. And they are aparently excavating or something becasue we could see the original street on the side which was a Roman street and it was about 4 or 5 feet below where we were standing (on the present road). It was AWESOME! We also saw some of the pipes that they dug underground as a drainage system which was pretty neat too.

Picture Time!!



This is the big cathedral from outside the main entrance. There are three doors, the big one in the middle is the one that you want to go through in order to get your sins forgiven, the one on the left is the door to hell, so you don't ever want to go through that door, and the one on the right symbolizes the door to heaven. These doors, unfortunately are not open to the public anymore.



I thought this was a neat picture...it shows some of the concrete cracking on the cathedral entrance that we went through.



This picture was from the Jewish Quarter. The strip along the bottom third of the building is some kind of flower that the Jews used to decorate some of their buildings, and you don't find it in the other parts of Toledo.



Here we have the mosque I was talking about. The right side is the original building, and the left side was added on by the Christians.



This is the original street of the city right next to the mosque. This was a Roman street (I think) and there is also a water wheel somewhere here that was used to pump some water in from the river. There were not many of these waterwheels because I guess that no one really knew what they were? The lady giving us a tour said that a long time ago, they didn't get water from the river, but from another place farther away through underground pipes.