Toledo: The Little City that Could - Parte 2

Continuing where we left off: the walking tour of Toledo. At this point, were walking towards a small church where the famous painter El Greco painted one of his masterpieces.

 If you look closely on the far right side here, you can see one thing that Toledo is widely known for: knives. There was a litany of little shops, like this one, that sells knives and other crafted items. The guy in the photo actually bought a little pocket knife in one of the shops.

 The entrance to the little church/chapel where El Greco painted his masterpiece. Sadly, you're not allowed to take photographs inside. So I'll just find a copy of it on the internet and post it here for you! Thanks, google.

From what I remember: That's obviously the big man at the top. It was very common during this era to make artwork that represented both the heavens and real life. I'm going to butcher this again, but I believe the guy dying is...a....king? The two people holding him are important religious figures, can't remember who, and the guys with the white collars around him are high ranking kings/princes. I think. Either way, a couple fascinating things about this: On the robe of the guy on the left, you can see the way the man died (stoning). There are only two people looking out from the painting, a man and a child. The man is El Greco himself, who is above the hand above the head of the man in yellow on the left. Many believe the child, on the left in the foreground, is the son of El Greco. 

You know what, if you want to know more about it, just go here or the wikipedia page of the painting.

The painting is pretty much the only thing in the entire entryway to of this little church. The painting itself is huge, probably 20ish feet tall. It's on the far side as you enter, however the painting was originally located in a position that didn't allow for many to view it. Once the visitors to the church became ridiculous, they carefully moved it into an angle that allowed for better viewing. Pretty awesome to see, and almost out of place in such a small town. Moving on...

 I'm planning on talking a bit more about this later, but this is the mandatory car in Spain - a small hatchback. If it's not one of these, it's a small expensive sedan (mercedes) or a motorcycle/vespa. That's pretty much every car I've seen here in 2 weeks so far. One land rover, one corvette (totally out of place) and a couple vans. Just hatchback city over here.

Pretty sweet. An outdoor temporary ice rink in the middle of a plaza that leads up to the biggest church in Toledo. It's not really that cold here, nor is there much water at all, so I'm sure this is a treat for the locals.

 Really awesome church. The detail on the entire thing is intense. They're restoring the tower to the left, which is obviously a very meticulous procedure.

Typical road (yes, road) in this town. They're almost all one way. Cars don't really honk if you're in the way, they'll practically just run you over. Seriously. There were some close calls.

A typical road sign of Toledo/Granada. They're pretty small and sometimes almost hidden. Getting lost in these maze towns is pretty common, and this probably doesn't help. This particular sign is important, because it refers to the sister town of Toledo, Spain - Toledo, Ohio. 

 You just can't hide from the yellow arches. This plaza (called Plaza de Zocodover) is known by  many as McDonald's plaza. 

Okay, let's fast forward a bit... At this point, our walking tour is done. It's roughly 10pm local time, and we had not eaten dinner. Our tour takes us back to the hotel, which is about a 10 minute drive (aka too far to walk) from the center of Toledo, where these pictures were taken and where the restaurants are. Me, my roommate and two other guys we met here decide to take a taxi into the city and get some food. No big deal.

The taxi shows up literally 2 minutes after having called for it. We get in, tell him we're going to Pastucci in Toledo. He pulls away, quickly, and we're off. We make some American-Spanish chit chat, he informs us about the shooting in Arizona, of which we were all not aware. Kinda weird when a Spanish cab driver is the one informing you of big events in your home country. Anyway, this is where this above photo comes into play. Remember I talked about small streets and cabs/cars basically almost running people over? This ride into town was scarier than most roller coasters. This guy FLEW through these tiny streets. You know when you go slow through a small opening in your car, checking your mirrors to make sure you don't scratch your car or lose a mirror? Yeah, forget that. This guy was gung-ho for getting us to our destination. I must have audibly gone "whooooaaa" like 4 times. I literally thought we were going to hit pedestrians on numerous accounts. This guy was playing real life Crazy-Taxi, and he got us there with time to spare (nerdy video game reference!)

 After eating awesome pizza (that took a while, but was worth it), we walked around the city just to see what was around. We came across this glowing building.

 And this one.

 And this view of greater Toledo.

 Back to Plaza de Zocodover (McDonald's plaza) for the nightcap. As I mentioned, the day I arrived in Spain was similar to their Christmas day, so they still had a lot of decorations up. At this point, it's probably closer to 11 or 12, yet lots of people are out at this time. It's here that we decide to get a beer or two. We stop in at one tapas bar, each get a beer (except daniel, he got a glass of wine) and with the drinks comes 2 plates of tapas! They're all little pieces of bread, one topped with a type of ham, and the other 3 with fish. One has anchovies. Not super popular with my group, but I take a couple bites.

Next, we head to an Irish bar just down the road. Turns out, some more people from our group are there. The bar is absolutely tiny; fitting 20 people in the main level is a chore. There's a staircase at the end of the bar that goes upstairs and downstairs. The bathrooms are down, and up is another level of this bar,  but even smaller. We head upstairs and grab a beer each. It's clear that the locals stay upstairs, as we were given our share of angry looks. We head back downstairs, beer in hand, and converse with people in our group while singing to hits from the 90's that are playing on the speakers. Pretty fun time.

 The view from our hotel room the next morning.

Our directors asked us to get to the lobby by 10am, with all of our luggage. We board two huge buses - turns out they needed two not because of the number of people, but because of the amount of luggage we all had. In 4 hours we would be arriving in Granada.