In España

Capital city Madrid was first up. A somewhat typical big city, the thing you do in Madrid is visit the Royal Palace and see museums and big art galleries. The Royal Palace is amazing. They let you walk through about 25 of the roughly 3000 rooms that are there. Decorated with tapestries, old and impressive paintings and extremely detailed frescoes on the ceilings, there is heaps to look at and it oozes richness like ummm, a toads back oozes poison. My favourite room was the one where "the king would perform the daily ceremony of getting dressed". Way to turn everything into a ceremony! I bet the Royal Flossing Of The Teeth ceremony would have been a right royal cracker as well!

My favourite city in Spain is now Cordoba. South of Madrid (in the REGION of Andalucia), on the day I arrived it was still 39 degrees at 7.50pm. The city centre has narrow streets and heaps of plazas where, once the sun goes down and the city cools, everyone emerges to sit around and cool off and look at fountains and stuff. I had a hostel room to myself in Cordoba and took to the traditional afternoon siesta like I was born to do it! To be in a place that views a sleep in the afternoon as a good idea rather than mocking it and calling it a "nanna nap" or "grandpa nap" was a joy. The highlight of Cordoba is The Mezquita which was originally the site of a Christian Cathedral in about the 6th century AD. Then the Arabs took over the city and knocked it down and built a MMM (Massive Muslim Mosque) about a hundred years or so later. Then the Christians in about the 13th century won the city back and converted the Mosque to a Cathedral so it´s got elements of both religions in it and is amazing to look at. This was King Ferdinand III´s doing. Commonly known to his mates as Ferdo or The Ferdmeister, his name seems to pop up heaps in this area of Spain so he must have been pretty busy with all his conquering and other kingly duties.
Now I´m in Granada where The Alhambra is. Rumoured to have been named after an EP that Canadian band The Tea Party released a few years back (I may be wrong about that), it is an area containing, once again, a combination of Muslim and Christian buildings/churches and gardens. Before going, everyone was telling me how wonderful it is, building it up again and again so that when I finally saw it yesterday I was slightly disappointed. It was really nice but too much build up meant it suffered a little. That said, it´s pretty impressive. Gardens full of hedges, flowers and running water are relaxing to sit in and the Muslim buildings converted into Catholic churches with elements of both religions make for a very busy camera.
I´ve got a couple more days here before it´s back to London. Actually, I´ll back in Melbourne in less than a month now. Just in time for the Grand Final!