Toledo, Spain

Toledo

The next day after Segovia, my family and I took another train to Toledo which was about 30 minutes away from Madrid in another direction.  This town was much larger and was an impossible labyrinth of curving streets with the longest being MAYBE 150 yards.  I don’t know how anybody could find anything.  I was just grateful that each alley and each street were unique and beautiful and resulted in some pretty great pictures.  I was with my family this time so I could only take 150 pictures instead of my normal 200. Oh well. 

This town had a ginormous cathedral that was about 500 years old and was gold plated in lots of areas and had the same gorgeous ceilings.  My neck had a migraine from craning so much.  The pillars that hoisted the ceiling resembled tree trunks and the wood and stone carvings were humbling.  And to know they reached such precision with no technology on which we so rely.  This cathedral wasn’t my favorite only because by this time I had already seen 3 or 4, and also the time period was new to me and I didn’t really understand it—and was really unfamiliar with it. 

At the cathedral, this guy said he had something to show us and snuck away like a rodent into the cavernous belly of the New York gutters and underground world—perhaps more romantic and chivalrous sounding than that dismal word picture, but you get the idea.  He told us that under this monastery was this unique artwork called domascene which is when you hammer tiny gold and silver leaf pieces into a smoothed surface of rock  and fire it to make it glossy.  It’s an artform that is passed down from generation to generation and I got a couple pictures of three generations working on it—grandfather, father, and son.  It was a precious and intimate moment.  We met some of the artisans and they instantly became my superheroes as I complained of working on my dissertation at Times New Roman 12 point font for several months—which doesn’t compare to doing this art work with no magnification for 30+ years. 

The city was surrounded by water and was built on a hill.  I would have liked to stay longer to take pictures, but I was also tired of walking around and getting lost—more unplanned exercising.  I kept walking around and around wondering why this felt as though I had already visited.  At the artisan workshop, I asked the guy if he had heard of the book Don Quixote.  And he says, “Don Quixote? Of course! It is called “Don Quoxite de la Plancha. This place—it is ‘de la Plancha!’” Score! I wasn’t crazy after all.  The sections I had read in my humanities class actually stuck.  I’ll be putting this book on my to-read-list for 2014 now that I’ve been to the land from which it was inspired.