Cordoba

So after Seville I got in my little bruum bruum and motored over to Cordoba! (I´m in love with my hire car... a Kia Picant that takes 27 euros to fill it up and it goes for ages!!) First stop was of course something old and ruined.... the Medina Azahara...















This was where a Muslim caliph built the capital of his new empire with the Muslims conquered spain. Only one tenth of the city has been excavated, and only a quarter of that is open to visitors!!
I really liked Cordoba, even more than Seville I think!! Its got an amazing blend of Islamic buildings that have been incorporated into later European ones, even more so than Seville. The cathedral was absolutely stunning......













Just wandering around the streets getting lost is great fun... you stumble across so much, like this old gateway to the city...

The Roman bridge was beautiful as well...... I found it on my first day in Cordoba, just as the sun was going down......

Well, its Adios to Cordoba now, as I head towards the coast to find some beaches to chill out on.....

Seville

Well, this is going to get a bit confusing now.... this blog will only let me put 1 enty and 5 photos on per day, so i´ve been trying to catch up on the summer trip stuff. i´ve still got lots to go, but in the meantime am going to start writing about the trip i´m on at the moment.... in Spain!
Well, it all starts in Seville. It´s a beautiful city with many many things to explore! One of the main sights is the cathedral, which is very very Spainsh!! It´s not at all like a traditional English style cathedral.. They have all kinds of rooms and little altars plonked in the middle of it! They also incorporated a part of the mosque that used to be there into the cathedral.... Its the Giralda, the tower where the call to prayer was made when the area was under Islamic rule. I climbed to the top and took this photo from inside the tower, looking over the top of the cathedral...












Right next to the cathedral is the Alcazar, which was started in the 9th century by the Spanish king, and added to in the 11th century when the Muslims took over. It is absolutely gorgeous inside- its amazing how many Islamic buildings survived and were kept in good condition by the Spanish! Quite often they built European/Christian monuments and/or buildings which incoroprated the previous Islamic ones...... something which I haven´t seen anywhere else in the world!This is the part of the inside of the Alcazar...

This is the garden and the remains of the wall which used to surround the Alcazar in Islamic times....

There are so many beautiful sites in Seville, I can´t show you all of them here, but here is just one more from Seville, the Plaza de España. It is really breathtaking.....

More museum photos (sorry- just can't help myself!). Egyptian museum in Berlin

The well famous and most beautiful bust of Queen Nefertiti.
















Another Nefertiti. The sculptors got the news that she had died before they could finish it, so threw it on the workshop schapheap where it was found by some lucky bugger thousands of years later! The block on top of her head is where they would have fitted her crown, which they worked on separately.








This is the beautiful ceiling of the Greek and Roman section of the museum.

This is some of the graffiti artworks on the east side galllery, the longest section of the wall.

A surreal moment...... not posters on this 1.3 km section of wall except this one- a basement jaxx poster!!

Berlin wall photos

Most of the Berlin wall has been torn down, but this line of red bricks shows where the wall used to be.









East German side of the Berlin wall.










The East Side Gallery. This is the largest section of wall remaining, 1.3kms long. It is an open air gallery created by international artists in 1990.









Somehow Swainey, Fi and I managed to run into a big protest in Berlin one day! I thibk it had something to do with Israel and Palestine. Note the 'Number 1 terrorist' placard....

The Pergamon museum, Berlin

The Pergamon Altar, from Asia Minor (today's Turkey), 165BC. The marble frieze shows the gods doing battle with the giants.

Ishtar gate, from Babylon 604-562 BC. This was the smaller gate to the city.

Why do my eyes always seem to be drawn to bright, shiny, sparkly things..... Babylonian jewellery.

Berlin photos

Reichstag, seat of the German parliament















Inside the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. There Kaiser Wilhelm memorial chirch. It was bombed
are loads and loads of gorgeous mosaics on by the allies in the war, and left in its bombed
the walls and ceiling, cracked as a result of state as a memorial.
the bombing.















Inside the Judisches museum The Judisches museum building. The
building is designed to be a work of art in itself, a
metaphor for the torturous history of the Jewish
people. The abstract, angled floor plan represents
a star.

Hi again everyone! I'm going to attempt to update this to include my latest travels and some of the photos. fingers crossed it all works!!!
well, summer holidays arrived again here in sunny london and i decided to head to europe for it. My mates from home (Hello there Swainey and FiFi!) were already in Europe but due to fly back to Oz soon, so i flew to Holland to meet them and stayed with Swaineys Dutch family. We launched ourselves onto the Dutch and German roads, thanks to Swainey and FiFi's hire car! First stop was Magdeburg, a pretty little town in the middle of Germany, a few hours outside Berlin. Swainey did a magnificent job driving on the autobahns, despite constant girly catch up chatter from me and Fi, and my amusement and constant repetition of the word 'Ausfart'- to be found at autobahn exits all over Germany! Next was onto Berlin, where Swainey and FiFi became my own personal tour guides, and showed me all the sights of Berlin, as they had been there earlier on their trip. I really really liked Berlin, it is such a vibrant, lively place!Everywhere you turn there is something new to see and learn about, and i get the impression that there are so many open air arty things that are constantly changing, It would feel like a different city each time you visited!

Brandenburg gate Checkpoint Charlie Holocaust memorial

Berliner Dom

Ok, im having a few issues getting more photos on here, so will post this now and continue the adventures in the next post.

Hi everybody!!
well, here it is..... my blog!! i'd like to say i'm terribly good at all this web stuff, but my cousin Mel has set it all up for me!! (thanks heaps guys!! I'm loving it!!) this is just a test message to see what happens when i press enter....... if it all goes according to plan I'll soon put details and photos on all about my most recent trip to europe this summer (06), so stay tuned for excitement, adventure and some random stories!

First test post

Welcome to Sharon's new Blog! Pictures can be added here too!