After arriving in Madrid with only 1.5 hours of uncomfortable airplane sleep, navigating through Barajas airport, withdrawing, ever so painfully, €80 to hopefully last me more than one day, and getting a cab into town, I arrived with a friend at the Francisco I Hotel where orientation was scheduled to begin. I had already been jaded by Europe after spending fall quarter in the expensive and inefficient city some like to call Paris. Like a true snob, I was less than excited to be back in Europe for another quarter.
The famous blue Madrid sky was covered by grey overbearing clouds, seemingly ready to spray down at any hint of irritation. The hotel, under construction, was located in the heart of the old city centre on Calle Arenal, just off Calle Mayor, one of the biggest, most central streets in Madrid. After some awkward introductions with people from the program, a margherita pizza and a Fanta naranja, orientation began. We were promptly told our living situations and that the next day at 9 a.m. we’d be shipping off to the province of Andalucía until Tuesday night, with stops in Granada, Nerja, Córdoba and Toledo.
The Spanish-only pledge was in full effect the next day, and we were packed onto a surprisingly comfortable bus for the six-hour trip to Granada, stopping at an even-more- surprisingly nice service station for lunch. Soon after our departure from the service station, I began to notice a change in architecture. The houses and rest stops on the side of the road began to seem less Roman and Western-influenced and more Middle Eastern. Restaurants began to have bilingual Spanish/Arabic signs, and the terrain changed to resemble more of a desert. We were approaching.
We arrived at the Alhambra in Granada around mid-afternoon and proceeded on our tour with one of the staff, who was unbelievably knowledgeable and gave us an amazing historical account of the significance of everything, some of which was sacrificed in order to take an inordinate amount of pictures to inevitably end up on Facebook. Before we had time to even process what we were seeing (or look at our newly taken pictures), we were on top of a tower with a 360-degree view of Granada, the Alhambra, the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains and the distant Mediterranean, with Spanish, Portuguese and EU flags flying proudly in the wind atop the tower. Incredible. It was literally like being in three different countries at once. One part Spain, one part ancient Rome, one part Middle East. This was a recurring theme for the rest of the orientation trip—along with the “tiny” feeling that accompanies visiting any kind of site with structures and history older than can accurately be measured.
That night we arrived in Nerja, a town I had never heard of before, but which would quickly become one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited. Our hotel was located on top of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea with our own private inlet beach below us (in fact, if you Wikipedia the town of Nerja, the photo of the beach is taken from the cliff beside our hotel). The next day, sunny and warm, was spent lounging and tanning, wasting away our parents’ tuition money on a Mediterranean beach in the middle of January. I don’t think anyone would have protested if we had spent the rest of orientation there, but alas we had more to learn about Spain, and more places to visit.
The next day we headed to Córdoba, once home of both Roman and Islamic empires. We visited one of the most immensely beautiful buildings—the Great Mosque of Córdoba—built originally as a mosque, converted into a cathedral by the Roman Empire and located in the Jewish quarter. It had been mentioned offhand by one of the program coordinators when we arrived that Spain was a country full of contradictions, but it wasn’t apparent to me how beautifully true the sentiment was until we reached Córdoba. The belittling and ageless beauty of Córdoba was enough to silence even the rowdiest of frat boys during our tour of the Great Mosque.
As if we hadn’t seen enough mindboggling architecture over the past three days, we managed to squeeze in a day-trip to Toledo, also a mixed hub of Muslim, Christian and Jewish culture. We skipped from a cathedral over to a mosque-cathedral hybrid to a synagogue-cathedral hybrid before arriving back on the bus, exhausted. Back to the airport to fly back to Stanford, right? Nope. Back to Madrid for 10 more weeks. It was inconceivable to think that we had only just begun our adventures in Spain.
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