My Travel Adventures

On the last day of my long weekend in Spain, I explored Toledo. Since basically every tourist site in the country opens at ten o’clock in the morning, I spent my first hour outside walking the road along the southern edge of the city. While this route does not have too many sights – except, perhaps, for the Old Arab Baths – it offers some pretty views of Toledo that most tourists miss. Since the Alcazar is closed on Mondays, I only visited the gardens at its base and then backtracked to the Museo de Santa Cruz. The museum, which is free of entry, has an impressive collection of art by El Greco, who spent half his life in Toledo and whose tomb can be viewed through a little window in the floor of the Monastery of Saint Dominic of Silos. The upper floor is mostly dedicated to azulejos and temporary exhibitions.

I began the day with an Uber ride to the Coptic part of Cairo. As much of this area is pedestrianised, my driver could not take me all the way to the Hanging Church, but he explained that all I needed to do was to walk straight once I had made it past the entrance to the quarter. He seemed quite bemused when I gave him a fifty-pound note for his helpfulness and almost looked as though he hesitated to take the money.

A few days before I returned to Oxford, my dad and I made one last trip around Bohemia. Our first stop was in Kounov, the fields above which are home to a mysterious collection of stone rows. It is unclear when or why these rows were built, with hypotheses about their use ranging from ancient observatory to new-age boundary stones. The former theory is supported by their apparent alignment with some astronomical phenomena, but the site lacks a regular structure and standardised stone sizes, which are typical of such ‘calendars’ elsewhere.