Sevilla tomorrow

It's been a week of school drudgery, but tomorrow we're taking the AVE bullet train to Sevilla and Córdoba.  Monday is a national holdiay here:  The feast day of Saint Somethingorother ... , so Chris and I are taking the long weekend to spend two days in Sevilla and one in Córdoba.  Andalucia is the really old part of Spain.  Having been controlled by the Moors for centuries, there is a lot of Arabic influence there, not only in the culture and architecture, but the people themselves are partly of Arabic ancestry.  The Arabs brought education and culture to a rather crude Iberian peninsula, but their tenure here had always been adversarial with the Christian natives.  After fighting back and forth for centuries, Ferdinand and Isabela finally expelled the Moors once and for all and converted their mosques into churches, erasing the Moslem religion from this end of Europe.  Uber Católico as they were, they went on to start the Spanish Inquisition in an attempt to eliminate any non-Catholic elements from Spain.  While Spain thrived as an empire during this period, human rights took an ugly turn for the worse.  The Spanish conquistadors who conquered and settled Latin America, mostly came from Andalucia and hence it was their culture which dictated what the culture of the (Spanish) new world would be.  So we'll see you in Sevilla mañana ....