I was at an airport, checking in for my flight. The pleasant young man behind the ticket counter asked for all the usual information, then said "May I see your carry-ons?" I showed him my day-pack, including the laptop case, and he wanted to examine the laptop. It had a separate keyboard, in addition to the charger and charger cord and I don't remember what else, so it made a rather unwieldy package, and he warned me that the security people were not treating such packages well. "I can build you a tower for... 375."

Huh? "Where's the decimal point in that?"

"$3.75"

This didn't sound entirely kosher, but I figured if he could get things into a neater bundle while I watched, it would be worth it to learn how. "Sure, I'll pay for the show. I warn you, though, the guy at the Apple Store wasn't able to get it any neater than this."

But I was getting more and more uncomfortable with what appeared to be a "side hustle", and eventually said "Let's forget it, just give me my boarding pass."

"Boarding passes are very much a... situational thing," he said with that ever-pleasant smile.

"ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE ME A BOARDING PASS OR NOT?" I shouted. Another airline employee, middle-aged female, came up from behind me and said "Is there a problem here?" And I woke up.

Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.

Last night when I visited the web site for the Las Huelgas Monastery, which houses the Museo de Telas Medievales among other things, there were tickets available for today at 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00, etc. I wasn't sure when we'd get out of the room or how we'd be getting there (one guidebook says you can get there by any of three different bus lines, but Google Maps doesn't offer any mass-transit directions at all, telling me it's faster to walk), so I decided to buy the tickets once I had more answers to those questions. (You can see where this is going....) This morning when I checked the website, there were no tickets available for any time today. I confirmed by e-mail that no, there really were no tickets available for today, and we crossed Las Huelgas off the list. Which made the day simpler: we didn't need to figure out transportation, and simply visited the Burgos Cathedral and the early-Gothic Iglesia de San Nicolas de Bari next door. Much of the Cathedral is 16th- and 17th-century, but there's some 15th-century art, and the claustro bajo at the end of the tour concentrates more on the pre-14c history of the building.


Stopped at a restaurant for churros y chocolate, waited about half an hour to order, and were told they didn't sell churros y chocolate until 4 PM; at this time they only do the menu del día. So we walked out, found a pan-Asian restaurant that looked faster, and had Chinese food, then got in the car and drove to Madrid (right past Lerma, but I don't know that there's anything to see there so we didn't). Checked into an airport hotel. Returned rental car. Ordered room service for dinner. Repacked suitcases. Up early tomorrow morning to catch a plane to JFK.

A laid-back day in Salamanca. We walked up and down the half-mile main drag(s) a few times, watching the storks that nest at the tops of numerous churches,

stopping for food, returning to the hotel for a nap, looking at more churches,

and other miscellaneous buildings

finding more food, taking the audioguide tour of the cathedrals (Old, i.e. 12-14c, and New, i.e. 16-18c), returning to the hotel for another nap, finding more food, returning to the hotel....
The New Cathedral didn't do much for us: the Gothic arches and ceiling are beautiful, but the decoration closer to floor-level is 17th-19th-century glurge.

But the Old Cathedral is full of 13th-14th-century wall frescoes and carved capitals in pretty good condition



The main altarpiece, made by a couple of Italian painters around 1440, is amazing.



Tomorrow, Zamora (with its several Romanesque churches), possibly Palencia (another Romanesque church), ending up in Burgos. Should still be a reasonably laid-back day, with 3-1/2 hours of driving interspersed with visiting things. Saturday morning we should be able to see the Burgos Textile Museum, then drive to the Madrid airport in the afternoon, check into an airport hotel, and return our rental car before flying out Sunday morning.

Today we were scheduled for a guided tour of the major Seville sights. We were given a meeting place in email, but then they changed the meeting place and informed all the registered guests… by WhatsApp. Which, last I checked, was an optional product that not everybody has — I had certainly never used it until a few days ago. But in Spain, apparently, it’s the universal mode of text communication -- so universal that it didn’t occur to them to try SMS, which AFAIK comes with approximately every cell phone.

In this case, the "registered guest" (the one who made the reservation) was shalmestere, so I didn't get the message, and she didn't and still doesn't have WhatsApp on her phone, so she didn't get the message either. And apparently the sender didn't get a bounce message saying "there's no WhatsApp user with this phone number," so nobody at the tour company knew that we hadn't gotten the message. It was mostly by chance that we saw the tour guide standing on the other side of a rather large plaza.

Anyway, the tour (of the Sevilla Alcázar, Mosque Cathedral, and minaret bell tower) went well after that. And again, the weather was perfect: 20°C high, blue skies, a few puffy white clouds.

The Alcázar in Sevilla and the Nasrid Palace in Granada, which we toured less than 24 hours apart, were built at the same time in the 14th century by a Christian king and a Moslem king who were friendly rivals and shared a lot of artisans. Both buildings have a lot of traditionally-Moslem-looking ornament, but when the money comes from a Christian king, Christian symbolism and the king's heraldry take pride of place. And the Christian king in question, Pedro I el Bajo Cruel Justo, had his artisans use the same textual formulas of praise for him that they would formerly have used for Allah, albeit in Spanish rather than Arabic. Pictures to follow.

The construction of the Seville Cathedral, unlike the one in Córdoba, started by completely flattening the previous mosque. They did re-use as many materials from the mosque as possible, which helped them finish building the then-largest (and today still third-largest) cathedral in the world in only sixty years, so it's in a consistent architectural style throughout. And they kept the minaret, the tower from which the muezzin used to deliver the call to prayer, adding only a cupola on top with about a dozen church bells. It still has the brick ramp all the way up for the muezzin's donkey. They also kept the patio where the Moslem faithful would do their ablutions before entering the mosque; it still works as an entryway to the cathedral.

Like most Christian churches, the Seville cathedral is cross-shaped, with the main altar in the eastern branch of the cross, but the gilded-wood "main altar" is almost never used -- only for high holy days and the Royal Family -- so most ordinary services use the silver "commoners' altar" in the north branch of the cross. The south branch has a sculpture representing the funeral procession for Cristobal Colón. The casket actually contains the partial remains of six different people, of which one finger has been DNA-matched to known descendants of Cristobal Colón, and nobody knows what other five people (men and women) contributed the remaining body parts. According to the tour guide, Colón's remains were originally buried in Valencia, then moved to Cuba, then to Puerto Rico, then to a couple of other places, and finally back to Sevilla, but every custodian along the way seems to have taken a piece of the original remains.

Anyway, as soon as we finished the tour, we returned to the hotel, ransomed our suitcases and rental car, and drove north. We were planning to visit a couple of Templar castles, but estimated that they would close about the time we got there, so we went straight to Mérida instead. Checked into our hotel, parked the car (in a residential neighborhood with very scanty street parking... feels just like NYC!), and had a delicious dinner at a tapas place inside the bullring two blocks away.

Mérida is best known not for medieval but for Roman ruins, and we plan to see some of those tomorrow morning.

After two rainy days in Córdoba, we checked out of our room and walked in the rain to the parking lot, where the car was intact and not flooded (although the lot was, as expected, even muddier than before). Drove in the rain to Antequera, where the stone gate had indeed been rolled aside and we were able to visit the dolmens, variously 4000-6000 years old. The two in town, Viera and Menga, have a slick modern visitor's center, QR codes to download detailed descriptions, etc. while the one a few km outside town, El Romeral (next to a shipping-pallet warehouse) has bathrooms and a couple of tour guides standing around. Viera is oriented, conventionally, so that its inner chamber is illuminated by the rising sun on either the equinoxes or the summer solstice (I forget which). The other two are more unusual: El Romeral, which we visited first, is unique in Europe in that its entry passage points west: specifically, it points at the highest point of a nearby mountain range.

And Menga's entry passage points south-southeast, at the highest point of a lone mountain which, seen from here, has the shape of a human facial profile. Although of course we couldn't actually see it through the rain and fog. Which are also why I don't have a bunch of pictures from yesterday.

Then we drove in the rain to Granada, parked at an underground lot, dragged our suitcases outside in the rain, caught a taxi in the rain, walked a block or two in the rain to the same Granada hotel we were at last week, and checked in. Hung things up to dry, put the room's climate-control system in "dehumidify" mode, and fell down in bed, about 3 PM.

We appear to have left a bag of Easter chocolate and related goodies in the hotel at Málaga, so we needed to replenish the supply before Easter was over. So after an hour or two of resting and drying off, we headed out (in slightly less-driving rain) to the downtown shopping district where the fancy chocolate- and candy-stores are. Then stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner: shalmestere had gnocchi with some kind of Calabrian-pepper sauce, while I had lasagna bolognese (which seemed appropriately warming and hearty for the weather). By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, and we walked two blocks back to the hotel.

Turned on local TV to see what we could understand. Watched a few minutes of a hunting-and-fishing show, a few more minutes of an action drama involving a lot of people shooting one another and blowing up train cars, then stumbled into the Spanish-dubbed version of one of the "Shrek" movies that we hadn't seen (Shrek is in an alternate universe where none of his friends, nor his wife, recognize him). Which is good visual humor even if you can't make out all the words, so we watched that to the end. Next on the same channel was a show about a couple of teenaged friends who work in a garishly-colored video-game store, and at the end of every scene they metamorphose from live-action to frames in a comic book. Again, largely visual humor (the female protagonist had mistakenly put on a customer's boots, couldn't get them off, ended up borrowing a bucket of Italian dressing from their friend who works at the pizzeria next door and pouring it down the boots to lubricate her feet enough to extricate them... and then they return the boots to the wrong customer and have to retrieve them... and then there's a plot thread about the male protagonist having, then losing, the high score on a particular video game and trying to regain his title).

My scratchy throat of a few days ago has mostly gone away, but the occasional coughing fits continue, and today I added occasional sneezing fits to the mix. Which was a problem while I was driving in the rain; fortunately I didn't actually hit anything. Slept with a bunch of pillows under my head, getting up every few minutes to drink water or blow my nose or pee. Not the most pleasant of nights, but we both eventually got some sleep.

The good news: the long-term forecast for our remaining week in Spain shows no rain whatsoever in the places we'll be, on the days we'll be there. In particular, our Alhambra tour this afternoon and our Sevilla tour tomorrow should both be rain-free.

Checked out of room near Málaga airport and drove north towards Córdoba. By the time shalmestere was awake and functional, the hotel's breakfast buffet was closed, so we planned to find brunch on the way.
There's one town of any size between Málaga and Córdoba: Antequera, which I'd never heard of before starting to research this trip, but it apparently has an impressive Moorish fortress and a couple of Neolithic dolmens. So we headed into the town center to find food. It was pouring rain, and not quite noon, and Good Friday, so not much was open, but here's what appears to be the main church in town:

We eventually found a pastelería crowded with locals, saw somebody getting up to leave, nabbed their table, and had some delicious croissants and thick drinking chocolate. And by the time that was over, the rain had mostly stopped. Walked up

to the hilltop Moorish fortress, the Alcazaba, which was captured by Ferdinand I de Aragón (whose grandson Ferdinand II married Isabella de Castilla) in 1410 after a months-long siege. Entry to the fortress compound (of 62,000 m²) is through an arch that was originally Roman, then Visigothic, then reworked by the Moors, then reworked again by Ferdinand

who, on the day of his victory, not only reconsecrated the mosque inside the fortress as a Christian church, but ordered the construction of a new larger church just outside the walls but still near the top of the hill.

The Alcazaba compound includes remnants of Roman housing, a Visigothic church, and the aforementioned mosque as well as the towers and barbican walls that make it a military stronghold.


Walked back down the hill, retrieved the car, and headed off to see the megalithic dolmens. Two of them are in town, next to a Ford dealership ("Auto Dolmens"), behind a fence and an admission office that was closed for Good Friday. The third is a few km outside town, next to a rock quarry or something, with no admission office but behind a fence and a gate that was closed for Good Friday. So that didn't work. shalmestere suggested we return on the third day to see whether the rock has been rolled aside....

Anyway, in frustration at the rain and the dolmen closures, we stopped at McDonald's (not terribly different from a US McDonald's except for the names of the sandwiches: the Whopper approximation is named the McExtreme), ate a late lunch, and drove towards Córdoba under sunshine and blue skies.

For our two nights in Córdoba, I had reserved a room in a youth hostel -- not so much because it's cheap as because it's well-located in the historic district. However, the hostel has no "front desk staff"; you contact them a day or two in advance to make arrangements for check-in. I had done that, and Friday morning I received an e-mail (forwarded through Orbitz) asking for my e-mail address and phone number, so I sent those. At lunchtime I checked my e-mail and found one with an "online check-in" link where I could provide my phone number (again), e-mail address (again), and scans of passports. So I did that from the McDonald's parking lot, although there was some confusion with the online check-in form.

An hour later, when we reached Córdoba's historic district, I followed Google Maps directions to the hostel (which ended probably 50m away from the hostel, since Google Maps thought incorrectly that the last 50m was pedestrian-only), checked my e-mail again, and found nothing. I parked in a tiny square, not blocking traffic, and left shalmestere to guard the car while I walked to the hostel and tried to negotiate our way in. I e-mailed again, I text-messaged, I phoned, and after several tries I got somebody on the phone who said I needed to provide my phone number (yet again), my e-mail address (yet again), and upload scans of both passports (I had only seen a place to upload one at lunchtime, and that one apparently hadn't gone through). So I did all that. The guy wanted to communicate on WhatsApp, of course, which I didn't have, so we did most of this by e-mail. I got an e-mail saying "OK, I will send you the code to get in the front door." Ten minutes later I e-mailed him again asking where the code was, what room we were in, and how to get a room key; no reply. Another fifteen minutes later I e-mailed him again asking the same questions; no reply. (This whole time shalmestere was sitting in the car 50m away, probably illegally parked, fuming and sending me increasingly aggrieved text messages.) So another ten minutes later I called the guy on the phone to ask the same questions, and he said he'd sent me an e-mail with all that information half an hour ago. He sent the e-mail again, I saw the subject line pop up briefly on my phone screen, but then couldn't find it in either my inbox or my spam folder. So he dictated the information over the phone, I got into the building, got the key, found the room, dropped my suitcase in the room, and told both him and shalmestere that everything was (finally!) resolved.

I returned to the car (still illegally parked with the blinkers on), gave shalmestere the room key and the instructions, and had her take her suitcase to the room while I looked for a place to park the car legally. It took probably ten minutes, a certain amount of scraping, and the assistance of several locals just to get the car turned around and pointed the right direction (the car is classified as "compact", and looks like a small car by US standards, but it's actually fairly large by local standards and has way too large a turning radius to maneuver in a medieval city!) Google Maps told me there were two parking establishments a 5-minute walk away, but when I got there, I saw nothing but a couple of bars. So I followed the hostel manager's recommendation to a place 15 minutes' walk away, on the other side of the river. There were police cars and people setting up barricades to block off the street for a Good Friday procession, but I was the last car across the bridge before they blocked it. The parking turns out to be not a commercial parking garage, but a free public parking lot. And since it had been raining much of the day, it was a very muddy public parking lot.

Anyway, I left the car there and walked back to the youth hostel, across a crowded pedestrian bridge over a rain-swollen Guadalquivir river.

shalmestere didn't want to leave the room for dinner, so I went out looking for take-out, in a crowd of tapas-crawlers; eventually grabbed some empanadas and patatas fritas and brought them back to the room. Fall down go boom.

Today, we see what we can of Córdoba. It's supposed to be raining off and on all day today and tomorrow. Hope the parking lot doesn't flood.

Checked out of our room in Granada. We were scheduled to pick up a rental car this morning for the next phase of the trip, so I asked at the front desk how close I could get to the hotel with a private car, and they said "not at all close". A taxi can legally get within about 10m, but a private car, nowhere near. They recommended that instead we take a taxi, with our luggage, to the car rental office (at the train station), get the car, and leave from there. So we did that. It took a long time to get through all the paperwork, although the two German fräuleine who were there several minutes before us weren't finished by the time we left.

The car is a Nissan "Yuke", a model I've never heard of in the US. It's considered a "compact" by European standards, which is good because anything larger wouldn't fit through some of the city streets we've seen. It has room for two people and two suitcases, but we can't fit both of our suitcases into the trunk simultaneously; we have to either put one in the back seat or lower the back seats to fit them side by side.

Drove south from Granada, with snow-capped mountain peaks to be seen to east and west (although we didn't get nearly that high). Four-lane limited-access highway all the way to Motril, then a different four-lane limited-access highway part of the way west before we switched to a smaller, twistier but more scenic, road that paralleled the highway along the Mediterranean coast.

Stopped at Nerja, which is a touristy resort town but by all accounts one of the less-noxious ones; anyway, we walked out the "Balcón de Europa" to look at the sea, then had a forgettable but slow lunch, then some excellent helado (dark chocolate and orange), then walked down to the beach to observe enormous waves crashing dramatically into enormous rocks, then walked along the coastal footpath for a few hundred meters to observe more enormous waves crashing dramatically into enormous rocks.

Decided we were getting chilled and tired, so we returned to the car (conveniently parked for 2€/hour underneath the main square) and headed for the night's lodgings in Málaga.

I had reserved (and paid for) a double room in a hostel in Málaga, for two nights, planning to use Málaga as a home base for a day-trip to Ronda tomorrow. The instructions from the hostel said "contact us at least 24 hours before arrival to arrange check-in," and I hadn't done that, but I called them on the phone several times and eventually got through. The guy I talked to had English no better than my Spanish, and he suggested we converse by text rather than voice (although he said "Send me a wsp", which is apparently a standard abbreviation in Spanish-language text messages... or is this a thing in English too?). The directions I had to the hostel involved a last few blocks on "restricted travel" roads, which I thought might mean taxi-only or something like that, so I wanted to clarify the directions. He replied "I have moved you to a better grade hotel; here is the address of the hotel, and the address of the nearest parking garage. Call me when you're 10 minutes away." So I put the two addresses into Google Maps and had it feed me turn-by-turn directions. Some of the route looked a little weird, cutting through residential apartment complexes along the way to a hotel in the center city, but Google Maps told me I was less than 10 minutes away, so at a stoplight I texted the guy to say so.

Then Google Maps started telling me to turn onto roads that were blocked by police cars, or blocked by traffic cones, or theoretically-two-way-but-currently-one-way-the-wrong-way, or even permanently blocked off as pedestrian zones. When I passed up these opportunities to interact with local law enforcement, Google Maps directed me down to the docks to turn a sharp left onto another major road, then through another roundabout onto a park road that I was supposed to take for half a mile before taking a U-turn to get back to the same roundabout... except the park road was open to taxis only, so I didn't take that either. And this went on for 45 minutes, and none of us understood a word Google Maps was saying, until I decided to just head towards the hotel and take the first parking garage I saw within a mile of it. We found a parking garage, allegedly 7 minutes' walk from the hotel, found a parking space that I could almost get our compact car into, but not quite, then found another parking space that I could get our compact car into as long as I let shalmestere out first. I texted the guy again to say I had just found parking, and would be there in 7 minutes. We got our suitcases and stuff out of the car and headed out... until a guy from the parking garage staff saw us pulling suitcases and helpfully pointed out that this parking garage didn't allow overnight parking. He said another parking garage, only 100 meters away, did, so we loaded everything back into the car and headed out. Except that I hadn't paid for my five minutes of parking at a kiosk, and one apparently can't pay at the exit gate, so I was stuck at the exit gate with several cars behind me, unable to back up and get to a kiosk, until one of the drivers walked up, pushed the "help" button, and I explained the situation until somebody on the staff opened the gate. The other parking garage, as advertised, was only 100 m away, all right turns... but that entrance was only open to monthly-pass-holders, or something like that. The guy who turned us away from it explained that there was another entrance to the same garage another 100 m ahead, all right turns, so we followed his instructions, and saw the cheery sign "Parking entrada COMPLETA" (i.e. full).

We turned into a surface parking lot where there were no spaces, but at least we were out of traffic long enough to do some Web research. We found another hotel, outside the city center, adjacent to the airport and with its own parking lot, and drove there, giving up on the one in the city center altogether. And that's where we are tonight and tomorrow. It's not picturesque, it's not in a cute neighborhood, but it's got parking and highway access and a bed and that'll do for now.

Checked out of our hotel in Toledo (in the rain), caught a cab to the train station (in the rain), bought some empanadas and a sandwich at the station cafe (in the rain), and took the high-speed train (in intermittent rain) back to Madrid.

When I originally planned this trip, I had an hour's layover planned in Madrid before leaving for Granada, but by the time I actually bought the tickets, that train to Granada was no longer available and I could only get one three hours later. So I tried to leave Toledo later, but those tickets were immutable. So we sucked it up and spent three hours sitting on a stone benchlike-thing with no back (seats with backs are at an extreme premium in the Madrid-Atocha train station) before boarding our train to Granada. Which was uneventful, and of course raining part of the way. We've probably seen several million olive trees today, and that's not an exaggeration: they're small trees, planted in a rectangular grid probably 3m apart, so a 30m square is 100 trees, a 300m square is 10,000 trees... it adds up quickly. And there were some striking mountains along the way too.


Got to Granada, caught a taxi (in the rain), which was stopped by a police road-block about 200m short of the hotel, so we had to walk that last bit with suitcases in the rain, dodging crowds of other tourists.

The hotel is nice, though: in a 16th-century building, with terracotta tile floors and wood-beam ceilings, and it's very conveniently located to shopping and sights. Got a delicious take-out dinner at an empanadas stand 100m away, brought it back and ate it in the room.

Tomorrow, probably more rain, but it's our one full day in Granada, so we'll see what we can see between weather and our physical stamina.

We won't get to the Alhambra tomorrow: by the time I looked for tickets, none were available for either of the days we're here, but I got tickets for April 1, so I changed the itinerary to come back to Granada for one more night (from Córdoba, where we'll be the night before).

Had the hotel's breakfast buffet, which was more substantial than what I think of as "continental breakfast" -- it can't be a meal in Toledo without ham and cheese -- but not as substantial as an English or American restaurant breakfast. Walked uphill (everything in Toledo is uphill, usually both ways!) to the Visigothic Museum, housed in a 13th-century Romanesque church that replaced a 10th-century mosque that replaced a 7th-century Visigothic church. The 13th-century wall paintings are impressive, as are the Visigothic archaeological finds in glass display cases throughout the building.


Then back to the Cathedral for the Palm Sunday (Domingo de las Ramas) service. They weren't letting people into the building in advance, but we eventually found the alley where people were assembling for the procession into the church. And there was a big pile of olive branches, from which people were breaking off smaller branches that they could carry and wave. Eventually some choirboys and clergy came out of the church (the former carrying palm fronds), there was a brief invocation, and the procession around to the main cathedral entrance started. Once we got inside, we found seats with a view of a TV screen (due to the cathedral's weird layout, almost nobody in the nave has line of sight to the altar) and listened to some readings and the Passion Gospel, in Spanish, before deciding we needed to leave. Had a good Chinese meal about 50m from the cathedral. Stopped at the Parroquia Mozarabe de Ss. Justa y Rufina, where there was apparently a service just ending and tables of food being set up in the street; we didn't stick around for that, but got a photo of the sign with the church's name.

Then headed northeast to Plaza Zocodover, where all the tour busses drop their passengers and therefore Ground Zero for tourist shops (even more so than the cathedral neighbordhood where our hotel is).
And northwest (and uphill) to the Mezquita Cristo de la Luz. If the name sounds strange, it was of course a mosque turned into a church in the 12th or 13th century. This one was left largely intact except for the addition of a semicircular apse.

It's adjacent to a lovely and calming garden and two gates through the (inner) medieval city wall, of which the Puerta del Sol is late 14th-century.


Then back to the hotel with a stop at the Iglesia del Salvador, which is still a functioning (fairly Baroque) church but shares space with an archaeological display about the previous mosque and pre-previous Visigothic church on the same site.

Fell asleep at the hotel until 6:30 or so. Went out looking for food, but there wasn't much appealing nearby, and the most-promising place we found had people smoking upwind of the only empty tables. So we went back to the hotel; who needs supper when we have marzipan and chocolate?