On to Cordoba

We have to catch a high speed train to Cordoba around noon and get up reluctantly, bodies aching from all our walking, to press our things into our suitcases - how the contents seem to swell for each stop - have breakfast, and take a last look around to see if we've forgotten anything. The taxi arrives and stops all traffic in the narrow Corral del Rey until we're onboard.
The train station looks like a stadium, super-new, and glistening with the cleanliness and order we have seen everywhere. Spain may be in trouble, but things seem to work remarkably well. Soon we're seated  in the bullet-nosed train, watching a flat rural landscape glide by. The trip is just under an hour, after which we arrive at an equally fine station (ai, Brasil - é a Copa?) and find a cab driver. Our drive takes us through a modern city until we enter the old Jewish quarter, La Judería, where our hotel, Balcón de Cordoba, is located, and where the cabdriver folds his side mirrors in to negotiate narrow streets like the ones we just left behind in Seville, except here the walls are white-washed.
The hotel is arranged around a courtyard with orange trees and French Ludovic in the reception tells us he has upgraded us to a better room. This turns our to be a huge L-shaped apartment reaching halfway around the courtyard on the 2nd floor. We have a sitting room, as well as ample bath and a bedroom, in which an old claw foot bathtub stands ready with towels adding sultanesque expectations to our stay.

Sadly, I sense hardly any of this, because I cannot find my passport. Over and over I stare into the orange folder in which I carry my documents, but it is really not there, and in a frenzy I go through my luggage and then Oswaldo's, leaving our beautiful rooms in total disarray. Finally, having sent various SOS messages to our hotel and to José in Seville, and the Danish consulate in Malaga, I wrest myself away - for Cordoba is waiting to be explored, passport or no passport.
We're minutes away from the famous Mezquita, but decide to leave our visit there for tomorrow when we will have more time. Instead we find a pleasant outside café on the Campo Santo de los Mártires, where we share a Tortilla Española and a toasted baguette with large sliver of tunafish and red pepper and finally a brownie with frutillas rojas. Very nice with a soothing glass of rosé. The city is full of doves, they swoop overhead and we hear them cooing everywhere. On a nearby monument I notice an interesting way of sending a "Doves not welcome" message - check out the spikes on the column:

The Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos is right in front of us and we enter to see the beautiful gardens, with many fountains splashing

and big thick cypresses shorn to resemble colums. We notice several cats, busily looking for something. Mice? we wonder. Maybe that too, but when we go upstairs in the old fortress and follow a sinister trail of blood leading to a several sad clumps of feathers, we think we may have another part of the answer: doves - they're hunting doves - like shooting fish in a barrel.

It is interesting to see the abundance of water in the winter for these places have been built to make the summer bearable. We wish we could see the flowers and sense the refreshing spray of water on a hot day, as we walk around in our winter coats and gloves. Still, we don't miss the crowds we saw recently in Greece at the height of the tourist season. It's easy to move around and get in everywhere, and the weather is fabulous, not cold at all when you're in the sun, but now it's getting dark and we begin to think about returning to our hotel - and check once again for that passport!

We swing by the Royal Horsestables, Las Caballerizas Reales, where we've been recommended a show. We take a look at the installations and buy tickets for tomorrow's show, then return slowly to our hotel, buying snacks and a bottle of Freixanet on the way. 

Inside our warm living room 

I search again for the passport and then settle down to write to the Danish embassy in Brasilia. Oswaldo goes through all his luggage and then says something about checking pockets. I have checked all of mine, of course, but grab the leather jacket I have been wearing all day, and which I have just wrenched off. I feel something hard in a discreet inner breast pocket - the passport. I have been carrying it all day, close to my heart! We celebrate this happy outcome by going to sit on the hotel's roof terrace, under a big gas heater and looking at the lit Mezquita right in front of us with Venus off to the right - and each holding a big glass of brandy in our gloved hands.

Here's a link to the pictures from our first day in Cordoba.

https://plus.google.com/photos/108088723826036223432/albums/5951992308652347761?authkey=CJj7_tr9-9iAcQ