Busy Weekend

Sorry for not posting sooner! This past weekend was rather busy for me. I went to a bullfight on Friday night and then Saturday I went to a town called Ronda. On the way we stopped at a village in the mountains called Zahara. It is the type of village you picture in your head when you think of Spain. All the houses are white and it is nestled up in the rocks. One of the neat things about Zahara is there is a water reservoir about halfway up the mountain, so the city overlooks this awesome looking lake.

Ronda is in the mountains and is about an hour and a half drive from the base. It has some really cool architecture and is built on the side of a cliff. There are some gorgeous views of the landscape below and we saw so many interesting things. One of the things that I thought was cool was that, just like at home, this is getting close to fair time in Spain. In fact some towns are already having their local fair. While we were in Ronda we saw the 3 girls that were apparently competing for fair Queen. They were all dressed up in traditional flamenco dresses. We also saw a Spanish Wedding taking place in one of the old Cathedrals. The highlight of the time in Ronda was seeing the huge bridge and aqua duct from the Roman era. There are many other arches to see in Ronda but the main bridge (pictured above) is impressive.

So, at 12:15 the flight surgeon suggests that we head back to the base. We are about 7 miles from the base in a town called El Coronil, I have mentioned it before in my previous posts because there are some old castle ruins there. Anyway, as we are driving through El Coronil, there are people everywhere and by this time it is 1:20AM. Kids are out playing, all the little girls are dressed up in their cute flamenco dresses. Being the curious travelers that we were, we stopped and discovered that the fair was going on in El Coronil, so of course we had to stop and check it out. It is very similar to our fairs back home, complete with sketchy carnival workers, but the difference is that all the ladies wear very beautiful flamenco or other traditional Spanish dresses and most of the men wear suits. It's kind of funny to watch everyone all dressed up riding the bumper cars! Needless to say, I ended up finally getting to my room on Sunday morning about 2:15 AM.

Sunday I got up and went to Chapel. Chaplin didn't do a sermon this week, instead we watched a video about the origin of the real Mt Sinai. I'm hoping to get a copy if anyone would like to see it. It is pretty much a real life Indiana Jones quest that these two guys embark on. They forge documents to get into Turkey and once they are in the country, they use the Bible and the story of the Exodus to lead them to what they believe is the real Mt Sinai. Everything that is mentioned about the journey, they find and when they get to the Mountain they find that it is fenced off and heavily guarded. There are no trespassing signs in Arabic and English and it's pretty evident that the Turks believe that this is most likely Mt Sinai as well but they are keeping it guarded from the rest of the world. Hmm....I guess if you were a Muslim country and you had proof of something that was written in the Christian Bible, you'd probably keep it a secret too. I mean the last thing you would want would be a bunch of Christians traipsing around your Muslim country right? I hope I can get a copy of the DVD, it brought up a lot of interesting points. Well, I guess I will close this small novel I have written. I hope to have some more photos up in the next couple of days. Take Care!