first half of the adventure

day 1: madrid
thursday, we got everything set. that means, buying train tickets for our upcoming adventures and working on getting dad's credit and debit cards to work (the companies froze them because they didn't know he was going to a foreign country). we also managed to go see the royal palace, the puerta del sol, the plaza mayor, the prado museum, and the parque del buen retiro and eat some tapas right off of the paseo del prado. all in all a pretty successful day. this was a funny picture... we asked this man to take a picture of us in front of the prado and he did. just didn't actually include the prado behind us. hahahah.

day 2: córdoba
we made it via the ave SUPAFAST train to córdoba the next day. although it was over 100 degrees the whole day (it. was. hot.), we managed to have a good time and go see all of córdoba's hottest sites: the mezquita, the alcázar, the synagogue, and the archealogical museum. these are the pictures of us: me in the over-1000-years-old arab baths of the alcázar, a beautiful little courtyard we found, and 2 shots of the mezquita.

day 3: tangiers

we took the morning ferry over from algeciras, spain to tangiers, morocco. we had no idea of what we were going to do when we got over there but we did know that we wanted to visit the kasbah, or sultans's palace, and that we wanted to ride a camel. we managed to do it all with the help of our wonderful tour guide assan. he basically ran us through on a whirlwind 3-hour tour of the city, trying to get us to buy everything we saw and bringing us to a restaurant. it was really incredibly fun and i was glad we didn't get robbed or anything, which probably would have been likely if we hadn't had our guide. we got to see a lot of cool things there. we also got to ride on the ferry right past the rock of gibraltar!

day 4: church in córdoba and then on to sevilla

sunday morning, we took the train from algeciras to córdoba, where we went to church at the small branch there and were welcomed by the members there. then we hopped back on the ave and went to sevilla and ran to the alcázar there just before it closed and looked around. that night, we went to a flamenco show, which was really cool and i was glad that we got to do that, even if there were no bullfights going on while we were there.