Sooo Cordoba was kind of a mess. When we left Madrid in the morning, we received a message from our Airbnb host saying, ‘8:30 is very early for checking in. And I will be at work then. I will be in the apartment from 12 to 1.’ Okay, then. All of our other hosts (before and after this one) allowed us to at least drop off our things in the morning. But if he had work, there’s nothing to be done about that. We locked our things up at the train station with plans to head back around noon, and then we set off for breakfast.

Okay. So breakfast was pretty stellar. We wandered for all of five minutes before coming to a rather unassuming outdoor cafe. The tables and chairs were made of red and white plastic. Nothing flashy. Nothing hip. But every table was full. Couples, old friends, families. The whole town seemed to be at this one tiny cafe.

We shrugged together. Can’t hurt to give it a try, right? We waited until a single man left his table, then sat down with his dirty dishes before anyone else could. We noticed almost every table had a plate of doughy, fried, plate-sized rings in the middle of all the coffee, and Kristina informed me these were churros. Nothing like any churros I had seen before! I’d only ever encountered the long, straight, star-shaped-cross-section-covered-in-cinnamon-sugar variety, and this looked nothing of the sort. A waitress grabbed the dirty dishes and asked for our orders. We replied by asking for menus.

“No,’ she said with a shake of her head and a small sigh. Uhhh… Okay. Luckily Kristina was there to save the day. ‘Dos churros?’ she said. ‘And café con leche?’ I added.

‘Chocolate? Dos chocolate?’ asked the waitress. We were confused, but then I realized it was probably just to dip the churros in. We agreed and the waitress left. not really sure how my ‘coffee with milk’ was mistaken for ‘chocolate,’ but we never did get our coffee. Oh, well. We probably wouldn’t have been able to finish it anyway!

A few minutes later, a waiter arrived with two of the thickest cups of chocolate (somewhere between hot chocolate made with pure cream and classic drinking chocolate) before placing a mountain-sized pile of churro in between us. Our eyes bugged out. Our stomachs complained. Our mouths watered.

It was sooooo gooooood. And I know I’ve said that about a lot of food and drink on this trip, but seriously. Go to Cordoba. Eat the churro. You will regret it for the rest of the day, but you will be happy for the rest of your life. I promise.

The dough was not sugar-coated or cinnamon-soaked. Just pure, greasy, deep-fried doughy rings. The churro and the chocolate were both too hot to consume right away. Fresh.

Needless to say, I burnt both my fingers and my lips.

Somewhere between the first and second ring on the pile of five, Kristina and I began discussing whether we would be able to actually finish this daunting pile of cholesterol. ‘Oh, we can do it,’ she said with determination. I wasn’t so sure.

Did I mention the chocolate was delicious, too? Because it was.

Every few bites, I reiterated my hesitation at attacking the rest of the pile. ‘We should have asked for only one,’ I said. We saw several other platefuls brought out to two-person tables, and none were quite so high as our own. Were we being hit on by the cooks? Had we been given the wrong plate?

It was honestly hard to complain. Long after we had reached complete satisfaction, we continued to eat. It was one of those timeless struggles. The stomach protests but the tastebuds win over the hand that feeds it.

I’m sad, though unsurprised, to say that we could not finish our churro. Kristina didn’t even finish her chocolate! We did manage to put down four out of the five rings, which in reality is probably enough food to have kept us going through the end of the week.

Then our waitress threw us another curve ball. When we asked for the check, she shook her head again and held up four fingers, saying, ‘quatro.’ I thought this meant that we needed to wait four minutes for her to bring us the check, which was a little odd but not entirely uncalled for, seeing as she was the only person waiting on about twenty-five churro-hungry customers. Kristina asked, ‘Quatro?’ to clarify, and the waitress again said, ‘quatro,’ before switching her fingers into a peace sign and pointing at us each in turn: ‘Dos, e dos.’ Then she showed four fingers again and retreated back to the dark depths of the churro factory.

I looked at Kristina, puzzled. ‘Was she saying that all of this was only four euros?’ That just can’t be.

And yet it was.

We really did feel like we were thieving as we lay a five euro note under the napkin dispenser and slowly rose from our plastic chairs. It just didn’t feel right. To pay so little for so much oil and so much happiness. It just…

I was speechless. We didn’t have any other options though, seeing as how we’d had about six different groups eyeing us in the last half hour in the hopes we would give up our feeble attempts at churro eating so they could really get down to business with our table. We sauntered/ crawled away, down the sidewalk, using each other as physical and mental support, in a sort of daze after the confusing and wonderful meal that had just transpired.

We spent the next hour or so lazily wandering grocery stores and pharmacies in the search for some blister repair perephernalia. The best location was this gigantic pharmacy, where young and old Spanish pharacists alike kept trying to help us with their limited English, continually bringing Kristina dry-foot repair and fungus ointments whenever she tried to explain the blisters on her feet. Bahahahaha. It was pretty entertaining.

And then we got lost. Cordoba was not built on the grid system. It was built more like a churro that has been attacked by small children for many minutes. Every interseciton seemed to have between five and seven streets leading away from it, all in diferent direcitons and bending after several meters. We ended up in downtown, which was pretty darn cute, but I wasn’t able to fully enjoy it seeing as how I was stressed about getting our things from the train station and getting to our apartment by one.

Still pretty cute, though.

Unfortunately, we ended up so lost that we were having a hard time getting un-lost, and one o’clock came and went before we had even found the train station. Plus, my phone was dead.

Cue the long and painful process of finding some shade in a park so Kristina could turn on her data, log into my Airbnb account, and try to re-coordinate with our host, who would not be back home until after three. Grrrr.

By this time, we are too hot and tired to return to downtown for more exploration. We are too hot and tired, in fact, to do much of anything. So, we lay belly-down under a tree, set an alarm, and passed out, sleeping off our churro-coma.

When we awoke and stepped out from under the shade, it became glaringly apparent that in the hour we’d been sleeping, the temperature had raised from Very-Hot to Oh-My-God-Do-Not-Go-Outside-You-Will-Regret-It-I-Promise. Unfortunately, we could not exactly stay hidden in our shady spot all day. We had keys to get. We began the slow and painfull walk to the train station before taking a lovely and air-conditioned bus ride to the apartment. On any normal day, I would have poo-pood the idea of bussing when the walk was just over twenty minutes, but, again, I just didn’t want to go like this.

We met our host on the walk from the bus stop to the apartment. ‘Are you Elizabeth?’ he asked. Who’s asking?! was my first reaction, as I had for some reason been expecting our host to be a small Spanish woman. Really not sure where I got that from. The person we were looking at was essentially the exact opposite. Large and unmistakably male, cigarette in hand and topless woman on his large black t-shirt, our host was anything but subtle. We walked to the apartment together as he babbled in a mix of English and Spanish and I pretended to understand what he was saying except when he asked direct questions.

The apartment was nice enough, if only marginably cooler than the great outdoors. There was another tenant, by the name of Joaquin, and I chatted with him while Kristina babied her blisters. He was actually pretty cool! He was in town for work as a musician, playing the tuba, and he was originally form some part of northern Spain. We talked about the weather, and he said, ‘Yes, yes. This is siesta time right now. Do not go outside. You will die.’ Again with the subtelty, though I certainly believed him.

This room had two small twin beds, which was nice because Kristina seemed to be taking advantage of not having me near her by throwing her limbs as far from her body as possible, likely in an attempt to expose a maximal amount of surface area to the warm air being circulated by our lazy fan. I lay in bed and blogged for a while, Kristina dozing away. Around 5:30 or 6, I noticed it was technically the end of siesta. However, I was certainly rather comfortable indoors, and Kristina hadn’t shown any signs of life in the past two hours, so I turned the fan a little closer to me and fell promptly asleep.

We woke up at nine.

Whoops!

Nothing to be done about that. I shuffled to the kitchen for some water, and Joaquin met me there with an amused, ‘Good morning.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, I know,’ I said sheepishly. ‘It’s just too hot!’ We chatted a bit about good places to eat, but our final suggestion came from our host, who told us there was a little restaurant around the corner with the word Vihno in its name. Can’t go wrong there, as far as I’m concerned.

We sat down as the sun sank below the horizon. The menu was completely in Spanish, and though everything sounded good, we kind of wanted to make sure what we were eating. The adorable waitor said he didn’t know much English, but then a couple minutes later, an actual Englishman sat down and said he was going to help us translate the menu.

He was so cute! Reminded me of an older English writer who lives in the countryside and travels for weeks at a time for inspiration. Kristina asked if he came here often, and he responded, ‘Well, I was here this morning. And I was here yesterday afternoon. And the evening before….’ Hahaha. The place must be good, then. Like the cafe in the morning, this place was nothing flashy, but every plastic table was surrounded by full chairs. Women fanned themselves and men drank many drinks. The Englishman went through nearly every item on the menu, giving suggestions along the way. We thanked him, and he said, ‘It was my pleasure,’ before returning to his own table. Why are people so cute sometimes?

I ordered the house salad, feeling a strong need for some veggies in my life after a day of dough and chocolate, and Kristina ordered some sort of scrambled egg dish.

They were both so good! My salad had walnuts, spinach, tomato, Greek yogurt, and probably many other things I can’t recall at the moment. Kristina’s eggs were made of mostly green beans, which is strange, but she said it was positively delicious. We also downed four glass-bottled Cokes throughout dinner, craving the cool bubbles and hoping they would offer some relief from the still-hundred-degree night. Just as we were leaving, smiles on our face and sweat puddles on our chairs (gross but true), Kristina knocked over a glass that shattered on the concrete.

Dang. We tried picking it up, but the adorable waitor rushed over and did one of those hand signs that umpires do when someone is safe, saying, ‘No.’ Hand motion. ‘No.’ He pointed to his broom and dustbin, letting us know he would take care of it. Actually the sweetest. I just wanted to take him home and put him in my pocket.

Sleep that night was hot but heavy. It’s pretty easy to sleep through the night when your body knows that waking will only cause discomfort.

We awoke in a hazy state of slumber, gathered our things, and made our way to the train station yet again. To Seville…

 

Venlig hilsen/ hasta luego,

Lizzy-wa