May 20 & 21-Days 10 & 11

We now come to the end of the journey. After another fine breakfast, we loaded the bus and began our trek north back to Madrid. A few hours into our trip we stopped in the city of Cordoba and had a guided walking tour of their city and famous Mezquita Cathedral. In my opinion, this Cathedral was the most unique building we saw (and we saw a lot of really cool and unique things). Construction of the Cathedral began around 800 AD by the Muslims. You can see their presence in pic number one with all of the striped arches. There were over 1,000 columns in the original structure. This vast Mosque was built in three sections, each built several hundred years after the previous. In fact, when building the third section, they ran out of the red rock for the stripes and used sand on the outside. Of course this section is now fading, while the other two are not.

As I have said before, the Christian Kings eventually conqured the Muslims and removed them from Spain. Instead of destroying the Mosque, they just built a Cathedral, smack dab in the middle of it. Pic two shows the high alter of the cathedral. The Cathedral is not really separated from the Mosque, so the two structures appear as one. This gives the building a real strange feel to it. Pic 3 shows the Muslim area of a wall, with a Christian cross on the wall. That is not something you see everyday.

A more recent story about this building. It is still an active Cathedral today, with daily and weekly masses. A few years ago (2004 I think) the Muslim population of Cordoba petitioned the Bishop of the Cathedral for use of the Mosque area for Muslim services. As the story goes, the Bishop granted this permission making everyone in Cordoba very happy. Unfortunately as the paperwork was being filed, the Pope was made aware of the plans. He overuled the Bishop and the Muslims were removed from the Mezquita Cathedral once again. I thought that was a nice "Christian" things to do (enter sarcasm here). When are we as a people ever going to learn to get along with people that are different than we are?

Ok, back off my soap box. After our Cordoba stop, we traveled the remaining distance to Madrid and had our final group dinner and returned to our Madrid hotel. The following morning we rose at 5:00am to get to the airport for our flight home. We made it through Amsterdam and finally to Detroit and home to Omaha. A 90 minute bus ride later we arrived back on campus at about 11:00pm cst. That makes it a 25 hour trip, of which I slept 2. It took me the weekend (we arrived home on a Thursday) to get back to normal. By Monday I was feeling back to my old self.

It was a fabulous trip. I would recommend Spain to anyone who is interested in going there. I cannot wait for my next trip back to Europe. Gina and I are in the early stages of thinking about a trip together (without the kids) in 2012 as a 10th anniversary present and a celebration of surviving Graduate School. We shall see. I hope you have enjoyed my tail. Feel free to comment, if you so desire. We will catch you up on the family happenings in June in a day or two.