I'm staring at my keyboard right now trying to figure out how to write this blog post. How to express through the internet, through the keys, through photos, through words - the magic that happened in this place - and yet magic isn't the right word even to use. Well - maybe I can't find the word of what happened here, but something did. I can't tell you why, can't tell you how, but this city took me so out of my world that it landed me in another one - and that other one has stayed with me since.
Toledo is a land of warmth, home, history, people, friendliness, laundry hanging on outside patios, churches, old stones around your fireplace, sunshine, smiles, ositos with chocolate, a sparkling river, and the birth of the best sandwich: mánzapan.
It's a small town where you can find traces of three religions, three cultures, living together and learning from one another. A mosque that converted to a church but still retained all it's arabic structures. Restaurants that serve foods that I've never seen before in Barcelona. A beautiful monastery where
monks lived and ate and studied and prayed together. Along with the little monk lizard who lives below the orange trees in the open-air, sun-light, thinking and talking and sharing garden.
But this intellectual curiosity also brings up difficult questions: why does so much beauty often yield so much violence and war? why would someone use a synagogue as a war barracks? what makes you happy? what makes you sad? what is that magic in traveling to a different place, even just a train ride overnight away? will it stay with you as you ride that train home?
I don't know. I don't know if the "something" stays there or if we take a bit with us. How can you take a city with you? Especially a city guarded by walls, a river, and small hills? Can you really take some of the conviviencia of the city, of the love for other people and cultures, of the warmth of sun and taste of ham, cheese, and apples back to that huge touristy city? Maybe you don't take it with you, but you are just affected by it and that stays with you. Maybe when you go back to Toledo you will enter that sphere again, as you walk under the arches into the old part of the city or you board that train from Charmartín to Toledo, and enter that dream-like world again.
Or maybe, just maybe, Toledo has become more of a metaphor than an actual place, and so you can bring it with you...
...wherever you go.
