Toledo: A Gem in the Heart of Spain

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone!! I hope you're all enjoying time with friends and family and are able to stuff yourselves full of delicious, American food tomorrow. Personally, theres a very, very small part of me that is jealous of those of you photographing your feet on the carpet at pdx, but the overwhelmingly bigger part of me is thankful this year for the opportunity to travel and live on the other side of the world, experiencing things many people can only dream of. So, this year instead of stuffing myself silly with Aunt Cindy's amazing potatoes and Mere-Mere's pumpkin chiffon pie I'll be eating my weight in authentic pizza and pasta in Rome, Italy on Thanksgiving. Yep, now you're jealous of me aren't you?

But before I leave for the Thanksgiving weekend of a lifetime, I want to take a moment to share with you my trip last weekend to Toledo, Spain, one of my new favorite cities in all of Spain. I was lucky enough to be one of 16 students who signed up to take a trip to Toledo with one of the Spanish interns at IES who is originally from Toledo. It was a nice trip because it was pretty much entirely planned out for us (meaning we didn't have to think, which was nice for a change) but it also felt like a trip with a big group of friends because our group was so small. In addition to the 16 students, we were accompanied by one of the language teachers (who is in her early 20s so nbd) and her friends from Argentina and Holland, and Celia, the intern from Toledo. Such a fun group. I can't even tell you.

The trip was a fairly quick one, arriving in Toledo Friday evening and leaving Sunday morning, but once we got there and walked around I realized that's really all the time you need to see the ancient city. It's much smaller even than Granada! Our first night in Toledo we checked into our hostel, which, yes, was in a castle. Check the photo below. Then we spent the evening wandering around Toledo in the dark before heading back to Celia's home where her mom laid out a beautiful spread of traditional Toledo cheese, bread, tortilla de patatas, salad, and chorizo. It was so amazing of her family to open up their home to us and allow us to spend a nice night together, enjoying good food and good company. But hey, that's Spanish hospitality for you!

Our hostel. In a castle.

The next morning, we did pretty much all of the sightseeing that Toledo has to offer (churches, mosques, and synagogues) in between stops for traditional Marzipan treats. We spent the afternoon wandering around the shops on the main street in toledo where I was amazed at the number of swords and suits of armor I saw in each and every shop. Toledo was an important capitol for a long time in Spain under many different reigns and still to this day holds its history very close to it's heart.

This was a synagogue. Surprised? I was too.

That night, we did another walking tour of the city, this time with one of Celia's family friends who is a certified tour guide. He led us through the different neighborhoods of the city, telling us legends that take place in many of the streets we walked through. One of my favorite things about the tour was seeing the separation between the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian neighborhoods that still today have those names, even though there are very few, if any, Jews or Muslims left in the city. However, being able to see the existence of the different religions was very interesting to me, since up until now I've only seen the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Granada.

All in all, the trip was short but I loved every minute of it. I'm still not sure how I fell so in love with a city in such a short amount of time, but somehow it happened. Maybe it was because of the people on the trip who made it so fun and maybe it was the history major in me showing its spots yet again. Either way, Toledo took a piece of my heart and was definitely worth every euro and moment of time spent on the trip. Thanks Celia for a great weekend and thanks to everyone on the trip for making it such a fun weekend!