España - Toledo

On the third day we were in Spain we went to Toledo.  That is where I studied abroad, and it was quite a feeling to be back there for the first time in twelve years.  When we got up to the Plaza de Zocodover, the city center, I saw the Number 6 bus drive by and remembered taking that out to the last stop on the line every day to the family I lived with.  We didn't go back to the school I studied at, but as we headed down the stone street to the cathedral I remembered exactly where I would veer off to the left to head to the Fundación.

Toledo is a special place.  We stayed outside the walls in a nice little hotel.  The Euro-quirky thing here was that you had to use a key card not for the door, but to turn on the power in your room - the lights wouldn't work otherwise.  That was new to me!  The proprietor was very nice and I got to chat with her in Spanish a little about my time here.  One nice thing about the whole trip was that my Spanish worked fine and almost everyone accepted me speaking it.  My accent was also normal here - my South American in-laws have always made fun of my Castilian accent, but I fit right in back in Spain :)

In Toledo we visited the Museo Santa Cruz, which wasn't open when I was there before, and which was free since it's under renovation.  We also saw the Cathedral, which was constructed in the 13th and 14th century, and the Iglesia de Santo Tome, which is where El Greco's famous painting El Enterramiento del Senor Conde de Orgaz is housed, but which is also a functioning parish.  I felt a tremendous sense of peace being in the little parish, with familiar church bulletins, pro-life posters, and the lit red candle to indicate the Blessed Sacrament was present.

The sense of Church history in this city and Seville in particular were incredible.  Unfortunately, one of the brochure translations in Toledo had some ridiculous wording about how, "today, this stands as a memorial to architecture, artwork, and common values of the West," or something like that.  It's incredibly obvious that these aren't any such things; they are monuments to the faith, and not a generic conception of "faith," but faith in Christ.  When you think about how Spain was under Moorish rule for over seven hundred years, a period of time that must have seemed interminable, the significance of each church and cathedral raised after the reconquest of each city becomes apparent.  One of the neatest features of the Toledo cathedral, also, is a room that has a picture of every bishop of the city dating from the 4th century to today, with many spaces on the wall for bishops yet to come.  That kind of history makes a deep impression.

Hiking uphill to Bisagra Gate into the city

This store made us think of Theresa

Mike by the side entrance to the Cathedral

Beautiful architecture

You weren't supposed to take pictures in the Cathedral, but all of the Japanese tourists were ignoring the signs so eventually Mike also  did take some pictures of the chapels and interior

There were vestments and hats dating back 600 years

After dinner in the Plaza de Zocodover