Day trip to Toledo-Saturday 25th October

Hola Teresa y la clase 9C de Onslow St Audreys,

Last Saturday I went to Toledo for the day with my French and my American friend. It was a lovely sunny day while I was in Toledo. Toledo was very different from the other Spanish towns I have seen before as it was very hilly and there were castle walls everywhere and knights and swords in the shop windows of which I have put pictures below. It was a great day out-we went to a few museums-the Museu del Greco (Greco was a famous painter of the Spanish Renaissance) which was amazing and the Museo Sefardi which was all about Jewish influences in Spain in the renaissance times (16th century). We were going to go in the Catedral in Toledo but it was very expensive to get in so I have instead attached pictures of the outside of the Catedral which is much more magnificent than the small free area we went in of the Catedral. For lunchtime we had the choice of having fast food (either burger king or mcdonalds) or having Italian food-I chose to have Italian food and had a pizza in a really nice cafe in their downstairs part which was very posh-we felt like VIPs sitting down there as there were nice leather seats. The pizza came and it was the nicest margarita pizza I have had since I have been in Spain, other than the really nice pizza place in Valladolid that I go to. In the evening we saw 2 weddings and a hen party going on-one of the weddings the bride had just married and there were getting covered in confetti and the other wedding the guests were walking behind the car which the bride was in towards the church. The hen party was a very public event with the bride dressed up and her friends dressed up as fairies-the danced in one of the squares in Toledo and there was a band playing music for the hen party and everyone around was watching the hen party-it was very different to how we do things in England. Overall I loved Toledo and all its strange medieval decorations with the swords and we found out that Toledo was part of the Don Quixote route which was very interesting-Don Quixote if you don't already know is a Spanish literary work from the Baroque period (17th century) which makes a parody of chivalry by making the 'knight's' battles to not be battles at all-for example he thinks something at one point is a monster he needs to battle-in actual fact it is a windmill he is fighting with. I also loved the Halloween decorations I saw in one of the shops in Toledo.

Shop in Toledo

Swords on sale in a shop in Toledo

Me and the others on the trip in Toledo

Toledo

Toledo

Toledo

Me and my friends in Toledo

View of Toledo from the bridge

Toledo

Toledo

Toledo (in the evening)

Sign in Toledo

Toledo

Toledo

Shop in Toledo

Me with a bull in a shop in Toledo

Toledo

Catedral, Toledo

Teatro, Toledo

Catedral, Toledo

Government building, Toledo

Catedral, Toledo

Toledo

Toledo

Entrance to Toledo

Toledo

Toledo

Halloween decorations in a shop in Toledo

Me at the entrance to Toledo

This week I have not been up to much except studying for my classes- I had a day off on Friday due to the Universidad de Valladolid having a holiday for Halloween. I have not done much this week-but in one of my classes which is about relations between Spain and England the teacher showed us this really funny Monty Python video of our ideas about The Spanish Inquisition. My teacher told us that there were several inaccuracies in this video however. The first inaccuracy is that the Spanish Inquisition were cardenals (as they are all dressed in red) and sent directly by the pope in Rome which is incorrect. The second is that they use the rack as a method of torture-this was not actually used by the Spanish Inquisition but by the English in Elizabethan times. Thirdly that the Spanish Inquisition force you to confess to guilt whereas in reality they ley you go if you were innocent. Also people were not just arrested for religious reasons. I thought you might like to watch though as it is very funny and shows key ideas about our impressions of the Spanish Inquisition-mainly that they are meant to be frightening and ruthless:

I have attached some menus below which I hope will be useful to you. I will try and get some more menus next week and send them to Teresa. I am sorry there are no more but I was so busy whilst I was in Toledo and these are just the menus that I passed on restaurant boards:

Tomorrow at 11:00 (3rd November) I have a trip to the Royal English College of St Albans in Valladolid. Next week on Wednesday (12th November) I have a trip as part of one of my courses to 'El Escorial' in Madrid which is a royal palace.
I hope you all had a really good Halloween and a good half term, 
I will talk to you again in 2 weeks time,
Becky