Our final full day in Córdoba was pretty quiet. We went out for breakfast (toast with olive oil and tomato sauce; fresh-squeezed orange juice) and then walked across the Roman bridge so Benton could replicate a nighttime shot during the day, then back across the bridge and off to find a sculpture honoring the patios of the town that had just been unveiled on Tuesday. It was the third of three planned installations in squares around town, and our bike tour guide had taken us to it to see if it had yet been unveiled (it had not). We actually had come across the other two on other ramblings, so we felt like that was a good way to complete the set! They’re similarly designed (same artist), in that they all feature the blue buckets on a wall with 1-2 bronze figures interacting with them.
From there, we made our way over to (or… “found ourselves at”) the archaeological museum, which turned out to be free and very well done. We realized that, after the various tours and sites and explorations, we were starting to have a basic understanding of the history of the town, from Christianity to the Roman Empire to the Visigoths and Moors (Muslims) and back to Christianity. There were lots of pretty interesting artifacts at the museum (the number of intricate pillar capitals that survived intact in this town seems almost unreal). And, the museum itself, which is very modern, is built on top of the Roman theater, so part of the display is actually walking down into the “basement” and seeing some of the seating and a bit of the stage of that structure. The displays implied that excavation was still something of an ongoing activity there.
We then rambled our way back to the apartment for lunch, siesta, and tinkering with code and photos and keeping up with the news. That last is, in and of itself, a little surreal, as we’re not actively consuming current events, but both the political demise (finally) of Boris Yeltsin and the assassination of Shinzo Abe were going to float through various notifications and be hard to miss.
Then, it was off to dinner, where we actually ate at an Argentinian restaurant. We walked back past the mosque, where there was a live flamenco performance going on a couple of stories up on a “terrace” in front of the mosque, with the performance being projected onto the wall of the mosque: Flamenca en La Terranza. We watched that for a bit, which was pretty cool.
Tomorrow, we’re off to València by way of Madrid by train, where we’ll meet up with Julie and Alana and then, the next day, with Lucy.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: the colors on the bronze statues at the new patio commemoration. And the guys transporting rebar for some project…by hand. Several times over the course of the day we passed them—in pairs, they were carrying 4-5 pieces of ~15’ rebar from a big pile (where, presumably, a truck could get to) up a few blocks on narrow streets to the actual construction site. It easily looked like something that a couple of piano dollies or some other light thought/engineering could have made much, much quicker work of.
Tim: Benton’s earlier observation that it seemed like the missing heads (and hands) on so many sculptures seemed like that was a symbolic defacement by conquerors. The archaeological museum seemed to really show this (although it was never stated)—any number of examples where much more seeming fragile parts of sculptures survived intact, while faces/heads had been destroyed.
