Today marked the first day of my big four-day weekend dedicated to traveling to Toledo and Madrid. We started our trip very early this morning…we had to meet near the school at 6:20, so Corinne and I woke up at 5:00 and ended up having to rush to our meeting place. We had planned on taking the Metro to city center, but over breakfast we realized that it doesn’t open until at least 7:00. Seville isn’t exactly a city of early birds, and unlike NYC, this city stops completely for a long, restful night.
So, we speed-walked to the meeting place and settled in for a five-hour bus ride to Toledo. I had prayed that God would give me rest on the bus, and I ended up sleeping the whole way to Toledo. What a faithful God we serve! I woke up in Toledo with a bit of a headache from sleeping in weird positions all morning, but I was grateful for the extra hours of sleep. Our first stop was an amazing hotel, where our rooms were assigned. I roomed with a girl from a few of my classes, Kristin, and I had lots of fun spending more time with her and getting to know her better. I say the hotel was amazing because the rooms had enough space to spread out, it was quiet, and we had a full-sized shower…little luxuries of home that are incredibly comforting and encouraging when we can have them, even just for one night.
A group of us decided to have a picnic lunch in the main plaza of Toledo, which turned out to be easier said than done. The streets of Toledo are narrow and winding, and they were designed to be confusing to invaders in the Middle Ages. The strategy of confusing outsiders still succeeds today, but eventually we found where we were going and ate lunch on some benches. The whole time I was having some serious nostalgia…Toledo is the city we spent the most time in when I came to Spain in high school, and it was sort of fun to recognize places and remember little things about that trip that I never would have remembered if I hadn’t been in the exact same places.
After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to relax for a little bit and then needed to head over to a local church to meet our professors and the rest of our group. We again got seriously lost, but we ended up running into the professors, who guided us to where we needed to be. At the church, Iglesia de Santo Tomas, we saw a famous painting by El Greco and got to take a look at a traditional Spanish Catholic church. Later, we made our way over to a monastery where our professors gave us tours and we had fun taking pictures. The monastery was beautiful, and I enjoyed learning more about what life was like there back when it was still running.
When the tour ended, we all split up, and I went wandering for a while with Corinne and Danielle, and then we searched for a good place to eat dinner. I was craving pasta, so we searched for a place with that on the menu, and we had a nice dinner before heading back to the hotel for an early night. Once we got back to the hotel, we worked a little bit on planning our time in Madrid. Corinne and Danielle had looked up things to do there, so we talked about our options and preferences before calling it a night. Corinne and I stayed up a little later talking about the semester, and it was really encouraging to have her pray for me. I’m praying that God will show me His purposes in this semester and that He would make me open and willing to go through anything He has in store for me.
I must have been really worn out, because I fell asleep reading in bed and accidentally locked Kristin out. She graciously only tried knocking on the door a few times before going to the front desk and asking for a second room key, which they readily gave her. When she got into the room, I woke up, said a disoriented apology, put away my Bible and went back to sleep for a very restful 9ish hours.
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