The bliss of solitude

Have you ever been in a changing room with two mirrors on parallel walls? That's a bit what Córdoba's Mezquita is like.

I'd been putting off seeing the Mezquita because everyone kept telling me how incredible it is, and I belong to that jaded, nothing-new-under-the-sun generation that thinks it knows everything. In other words, I had low expectations. Besides, I'd seen plenty of photographs of its iconic red-and-yellow arches, and I wasn't too impressed.

But photos of the arches don't give perspective, and no image can recreate the feel of a space. And to me, that's what the Mezquita is about. All those enormous, repeating arches in the vast room of the Mezquita make you feel minuscule. The emphasis is on nature; though some of the stone is painted, most of the geometric carvings bring out the natural beauty of the rock. The building has a great deal of natural light as well.

The low point of the Mezquita is the assortment of Catholic art, which might be quite beautiful in a medieval cathedral but looks very out-of-place in the ancient, minimalist building. Whereas the Arabic writing and designs are gold-gilded or have a smidge of silver, the Catholic areas display piles of pure-gold artifacts, like the lair of a really tacky dragon.

There's also a slab of stone carved with a large number of names. Beneath the names, the stone reads:
Sacerdotes diocesanos que dieron su vida por Cristo en la persecucion religiosa 1936-1939*

This "religious persecution" was the Spanish Civil War.

*"Diocesan priests who gave their lives for Christ in the religious persecution from 1936-1939"

Spanish home births.

Today, a woman invited me to a nacimiento, which, being the boss at Spanish that I am, I immediately knew to mean birth.

"Interesting!" I exclaimed. "I've never seen one before."

"Never?" she asked.

"No..."

"It's in my house," she told me. "It's going to be sometime in late December."

Oh, I said to myself, she must be a midwife! "Are births often in houses here?" I asked.

"Yes, a fair amount," she replied. "And in churches, of course."

Churches? I thought, puzzled.

"You're living in Córdoba, right?" she asked. I nodded, and she continued, "Keep an eye out for signs. Some houses enter in competitions."

That was when I realized that nacimiento means a nativity scene.

AWKWARD.

WARNING: Vaguely political content ahead.

Yesterday I experienced, for the second time in my life, what it's like to be the only American in a group of Europeans watching a Michael Moore documentary.

It's not a nice feeling.

In the US, I can appreciate Michael Moore because he's completely up-front about his bias, and if you sift through it you find interesting information and hear the voices of people you otherwise probably would never talk to in your day-to-day life. Sure, I wince at some of the generalizations and sure, I have some pretty heavy criticism, but if Fox News can have the motto, "Fair and Balanced," there's no reason someone like Michael Moore can't make documentaries in which he honestly states his personal beliefs.

But watching Bowling for Columbine in my "Imperio, diversidad y globalización en el mundo de habla inglés" class was just uncomfortable.

If you're watching one of his movies with an American audience, you can shake your head and wince at all the stupid stuff that goes on in our country. You get it. You've met people like that. You know what it's like. But as I was watching it at the Universidad de Córdoba, all I could think was, "Oh boy, more American stereotypes confirmed." Every proud gun-owner going on about shooting burglars (or building bombs) was another tally mark against my country in my classmates' eyes, or at least, that's what my paranoid imagination leads me to believe.

Then the professor stopped the movie to talk with us about how diverse the US is and how every state is different and has its own culture, and not all Americans support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... and then my conscience kicked in and I wanted to say, "Our country as a whole supports these things, though. Collectively, we're guilty."

I don't want people from outside the US to get the impression that it's one big mess of violence and belligerence. But sometimes I see it that way myself.