Bus to Cordoba: one of my nicest journeys so far. It's about 2 1/2 hours, through olive groves and steep hillsides all the way, passing through villages here and there. My reading material, tragically and prematurely, came to an end last night, including 3 books people gave me along the way, but even better: I have audiobooks on Ipod, so I can stare out the window and just listen.
La Mezquita, the Great Mosque: I needed one last treasure of architectural glory and wonder. And I'm so glad I came. I would have hate to have missed this place. For sheer architectural spatial experience, I've never been anywhere like it. It's the mosque with the forest of columns, with the red-striped double arches at the top. And there are so many that it does feel like a forest, and the hundreds and hundreds of double arches feel like a tree canopy. There are way more of them than I would have thought possible, as far as the eye can see. Standing mid-arch, you look down and see one arch inside another, almost to infinity; if you step sideways, of course the perspective changes, and it's dizzying diagonals of arches veering off in either direction. You want to take a picture every few feet. The rhythm changes when you get to the most important places, and there are niches with poly-loved arches and other kinds of detail. I walked round looking straight up, with my mouth open I think, for a long time.
Despite the spectacular space here, what's on my mind today is religion, with the general theme of "Can't we all just get along?" Because inserted directly into the center of this beautiful forest of columns, is an unspectacular and jarring cathedral, courtesy of the Spanish Inquisition and its aftermath. It's invasive, and it's disharmonious. I am not railing against the Catholic church, or any other church, but it's just such a tangible example of conflict, and conquest, and attempts at subjugation and oppression. This process has been going on back and forth as long as there has been culture, but it seems so tangled, and so timely, here in Andalucian Spain.
Another reminder of conflict: there are more police officers here than I have seen at any point during my trip. Van loads of them, and they're surrounding the mosque-cathedral, and walking around it in clusters, and patrolling the perimeter. I don't know whether there's something up, or whether this is normal behavior, since I am so entirely out of the news loop. But it makes this place feel like contested ground, still.
I have, in fact, 3 pages in my travel journal on this topic, which I will spare you, my friends. But it includes thoughts on why people have been apologizing to me for two months for the radicals who have given Islam such a bad name in recent years, though I have never once broached the subject. It wasn't my intent to travel to so many Islamic places, I just followed the architecture; but I found nothing but welcome and cheerleading for America and Americans, and sincere pain about the conflict, and what it´s done to the relationships between America and places like Indonesia, and Istanbul, and Egypt, and Zanzibar. I can't count the number of people who told me in these places that they were grateful I came, because the threat of terrorism has been so hard on their morale, and their livelihoods, and their opportunities. To that I would say, if you let terrorists dictate where you do and don't go, then you have let terrorism prevail. I am a cautious traveler and I believe in common sense, but I am not about to start living in fear. All of that is a far cry from where I started this morning, at La Mezquita in Spain, but looking at the swarms of security officers and the remnants of the Spanish Inquisition, it feels kind of appropriate. It's a tangled issue, and it has deep roots, and I have no words of wisdom to offer. But it pains me.
On a lighter note, I loved the rest of Cordoba. The old city is really charming; I strolled and shopped and resisted the urge to buy a pair of flamenco dance shoes, and I tried a tapas sampler including octopus, and two kinds of potato salad, and chorizio sausage. Back to Malaga, where I was surprised with a giant H & M at the train station: new clothes, after wearing the same 4 or so bedraggled outfits for weeks....
tomorrow, family time. Off to Brussels and chocolate and lace and Delirium Tremens beer.
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