Córdoba Day 1

We're on holiday. OK, this has been true for the last week or so, and I've not written anything about it so far. This is largely due to the fact that our first bit of holiday was in the UK visiting friends and family, and whilst it was interesting to us, may have been less so to everyone else. "No different to the rest of your blog", I hear you cry. OK then - we landed on Monday and went to Marlow to stay with Nicola's sister, Lisa, for one night, before heading over country to Bath, there to meet with Sacha and son, who studies there. We had lunch in the Pump Room.

We then stayed two nights with Sacha in Guildford, before picking up a rental car and driving down to Sandwich to see my folks. Another short visit - one night only - before driving to Tunbridge Wells and staying for lunch with a schoolfriend of Nicola's, Judith; continuing down to Poole to stay the weekend with Gus and the others from the Edelweiss Society of Pembroke College, Oxford. We partied at Jason's on the first night, then all went out to Poole's premier Italian gastronomic delight, Al Gatto Nero, on Saturday night. Saturday daytime and Sunday were spent on Poole beach, in a hut rented especially for the purpose.

With me so far? On Sunday, we drove back to Sacha's for tea and to drop off our heavy luggage, as we were on our way to Spain with hand luggage only. We overnighted at Gatwick Airport before catching a Norwegian Airlines flight to Malaga on Monday morning. I had booked a medium-sized automatic car in advance, and we were somewhat taken aback when they told us we had a Citroen Picasso. As I was sitting in it to try and figure out how it worked, in particular the satnav, we were hustled out of our space by someone wanting to return their car in the same place. So we drove out and tried fruitlessly to work it out on the fly (there weren't any instructions or anything like that), before parking and sorting it out. It didn't help that my phone had decided it didn't want to connect to the internet, and we therefore couldn't find the street address of our hotel in Córdoba.

We did eventually sort it all out, and were directed onto the motorway to Córdoba, and to our hotel, with ease. We checked in, checked out the rooftop pool, then walked into the Jewish Quarter, which is the main tourist area of the city, made of a series of small streets and alleyways with a lot of historical-looking buildings and architecture. We stopped for a quick bite (beer and tapas) early on to refresh ourselves, and then selected, more or less at random, what appeared to be a nice place for dinner, called Bodegas Mezquitas. This turned out to be quite a popular place! Luckily we had beaten the rush, and ordered the tapas menu, which comprised six dishes including speciality of the region, salmorejo - a cold soup made with bread and tomatoes, similar to gazpacho. We treated it more like a dip than a soup. 

That was the end of our first day in Córdoba. We walked back to the hotel and collapsed.