Holy Toledo!!! Day 1

OK, so I know that everyone is using that tagline for this trip but I really don't care because I like it. Anyways, this weekend we went to the city of Toledo. It was one of the coolest places I've seen so far. I really liked it. There is a chance that due to my have a party personality I only got 90 minutes of sleep the night before so the train ride was pretty interesting. We took the bullet train and it didn’t really seem like we were speeding like a bullet but I, not being a huge train rider, don’t have much to compare it with and we did, in fact arrive in Toledo rather quickly.When we pulled into the city I was immediately blown away. It was like in Timeline where they are suddenly thrown back 500 years. It was awesome and even the Train station had an armour shop. Dr. Shumway wanted us to all to have the walk up experience that he had had a year earlier so we walked for 30 minutes up hill to our hotel. I'm not complaining, just explaining so that it is understood why I was really worn out that night. It was actually really fun and we got a lot of really good pictures. As we "stormed the city" I tried to put myself into the mindset of the Christians who did the same during the reconquest and the Moors during the invasion centuries earlier. It was really cool to get the whole medieval city feel as we made the hike up. As you can see Trevor and Aaron were our official hike buddies. I really do love those kids.We got to the hotel and left our stuff there so that we could head over to the 3rd largest Cathedral in the world in Toledo. Wow, it was impressive. The story is that way back when in 711 the Moors invaded the Spanish Peninsula. They won everything except the very northernmost part. In 1085 the Christians took it back. It was the Visigoth capital before the Moors and one of the largest and first cities to be reconquested. To make a big deal about it as a symbol for the rest of the long war they built the Cathedral. So, there was a lot of work and money that went into it. Hence, its huge and elaborate. OK, so that is why we went to Toledo. So as I was saying, before even checking in officially we walked over to the Cathedral. On the way we saw that someone had made a cheap knock off of my suit jacket. Some people have no shame. So, as I was saying, again, the Cathedral is immense. From the outside you can see the massive walls were elaborately carved with these awesome designs from the Bible. Later that night I went on the night time tour of Toledo and found out that it is the capital of the satanic churches of the world because of this cathedral. As the story goes, there is one apocryphal writing where it describes the scene of Cain and Able in a different light. Cain is shown as being a very dark creature who kills Able by biting his neck and draining his blood. Satanical groups are known to idealize the Vampire as the perfect being because they thrive in darkness and their life comes from the death of others. Anyways, the Satanists worship this account from the apocrypha. They say that all vampires are descendants of Cain. Here in Toledo the scene of Cain and Able is depicted in the same way. This is only place in the entire world where this idea is depicted. This shows that this Anti-Christ sect has been around since the creation of the Cathedral and already had enough money, power, and influence to get the sculptor to sculpt that scene that specific way. Because of this, in the 1970’s, when some guy from San Francisco decided to proclaim himself the papa negra, he did so in Toledo. So that is how cool I later found these simple carvings to be. If you thought the outside was cool, you should have seen the inside. It was awesome. They had a Goya painting there that was really good and not all to standard of his style. It was obviously painted before he started going depressed and crazy. We couldn't take pictures inside so you'll have to take my word for it. I did however find an awesome shop which sells LOTR merchandise. From there we went to an ancient Jewish synagogue. It was way cool and, although I wasn't completely enthralled by it, we sure had a lot of fun. I found out that the triforce is an ancient Jewish symbol. I had a very artistic photo idea. As Dr. Shumway had pointed out to me, even Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood knew the high quality of Toledo’s swords as demonstrated when the sheriff receives Spanish Steel and then kills someone with it. So off I was in search of my own Spanish Steel. Here is just an idea of how awesome looking this city was. I don't really know what was up with Andrew's face here. The important thing is that we found swords and I felt like Duncan for a moment. (I did, in fact, later find Duncan's sword but pictures weren't easy to take in every store.) We were obviously shopping around so we were trying see as many sword shops as possible, taking advantage of the time to have fun. A couple of the guys wanted to go out with a plan but I decided to let fate and my innate sense of history guide us. We purposefully lost ourselves in one of the world’s most enchanting cities. We found a nunnery which made mazipan. Not to be confused with marzipan, Homestar’s girlfriend. This stuff was delicious. There were a lot of pictures that we had to do timer shots and I was very sad to see that this picture turned out so bad. From there we basically just took every tiny alley we could that seemed to head in the direction we wanted to go. We suddenly found ourselves overlooking an immense view of a cathedral and the surrounding city. I immediately remembered how the city was such a good defensive position because the castle was so high and because the city was a natural maze of streets. As we looked down I could not help but agree. If I had been trying to get to a certain place I never would have found it. But using a bit of reversed logic, I didn’t try to go anywhere and ended up exactly where I wanted to be. A lot of the guys we talked to that night had tried really hard to find the nunnery and really cool scenery and couldn't. We, on the other hand, had the time of our lives. As I was saying, that night we went on a "ghost tour" of the city. It wasn't that scary but it was really interesting. The two guys who were our guides were really cool. It was all in thick Spanish but most of us got by just fine. We didn't ever go in anywhere though and the last couple of stops I had to sit down because I was just to tired to stand still. We ate paella that night and it was really really good. When we finally got back to the hotel I was pretty darn worn out. We decided to watch a movie and I think I got through half of it before falling asleep.