After staying out til 2:30am watching Flamenco in Sevilla, I grabbed a morning bus to Cordoba. I was hoping to escape some of the heat from Sevilla, but it hit 38 in Cordoba. Ouch. Luckily, my hostel was very cool at night. There didn’t seem to be much going on in Cordoba, so I figured I would have a quiet couple of days, but of course the second I left my hostel I wandered, ending up in front of the Alcazar, where apparently Cordoba was just getting started with their Corpus Christi celebrations. I sat down with the others and had a front row view of the procession.
It was so hot in Cordoba that it was basically impossible to function between 3 and 7pm, showcasing the necessity of siesta culture. I did manage to find an express grocery store open on Sunday though, scoring some baking powder to try and absorb what seemed like a whole jar of pesto that had spilled onto my shirt while in my backpack. If you’re counting, I’ve now replaced a towel, saved my pants, recovered my shorts, and now, after rubbing baking powder for two days on my shirt, managed to save that one too.
The next day was Monday, so a lot of Cordoba wasn’t open, including the Alcazar, so I wandered around until the heat got to me, trying to get off the tourist grid, until at one point I seemed to reach a dead end, until a bunch of locals yelled and pointed me to go through an apartment complex, which totally worked. I also did a walking tour and hit up a local tapas bar to try the famed Salmorejo, a cold tomato soup, which turned out to be much better than it looked. Cordoba was yet another lovely city in Andalucia, if a little hot at this time of year. Apparently, the cities in Andalucia compete to see which gets the hottest, as a point of pride.
Just before my bus, I woke up early to see the Alcazar for free (woohoo), which was stunning. I grabbed some breakfast and took a 5.5 hour bus that dropped me off at the Madrid airport (the train would be much faster, but would require a transfer to the metro, and cost a lot more). I arrived exactly 2 hours before my flight to Lyon, long enough to spend some time in the lounge tasting Spanish tempranillos. I had not been drinking very much at all, as the last thing I needed was to be more dehydrated, so the wine was pretty exciting. Plus, it was free.
I took a quick 2 hour flight, hopped on a very overpriced train to the centre of Lyon, and walked 20 minutes to my hostel at midnight. I was in shorts and it was still hot. I had booked my hostel based on its proximity to the train station, as I had a train 8 hours later, and not apparently, on air conditioning. Or fans. No fans. Apparently, this heat was very unusual for France (yes, I had arrived just at the start of the heat wave), but still, no fans? Eventually I got up at 3:30am and had another shower, soaking my hair and falling to sleep for a few hours.
I wandered back to the train station for the 2 hour trip to Dijon, where I was meeting Rosa and Mitch for the day, before we met up with the others in Ansieres Et Montagne, a small town in rural France in Burgundy, where we were all attending the wedding of our friend Cassie to her fiance Tyler. I arrive in Dijon and proceeded to spend the next hour in the air conditioned room of Rosa and Mitch before they had to check out. It was oppressively hot outside. We went to grab a pain au chocolate (really, this was all I wanted to do in France), which turned out to be mediocre, so we had a second round, which turned out to be delicious. We sweated our way through lunch (really all we did was eat), before getting a blissfully air conditioned train for 45 minutes to Ansieres et Mogninon. The train pulled up at, well, certainly not a station, but the train stopped, and we got off. Into the middle of rural France, with nothing around. Luckily we had a pre-arranged taxi waiting for us.
