PLACES - 1 OF 4 JOHN'S REFLECTIONS OF TRIP.

Places

Some were new, some we had seen before. One or two were so familiar, that it was like, as I wrote in the blog, feeling right at home. Julie and I have seen places of great beauty, great sorrow, and great historical significance, sometimes the same place is all three - for example, Carcasson near Toulouse in the South of France.

Around this area lived a group of Catholics called the Cathers (The Good Men) whose beliefs within the Cathoic framework I admired so much that even I could go along with them. Remember, I am not a Catholic. 

 Sadly, the hard liners in Rome sent the Crusaders down to destroy them, which they did. The good news  s that these peoples beliefs never really went away, and so live on today. 

 Another nice reason for returning to a place apart from the feeling of being "at home", is that you can actually do what you promise yourself.   When you say "If ever I go back to... I will ". For me it was returning to the mosque/cathedral In Cordoba. This time I actually did pluck up courage to touch a building that is over thirteen hundred years old, i.e. over ONE THOUSAND!!! yeears old, and retake a photo that didn't come out on the last trip of a little room that made me think about religion. 

Originally, this little room was not walled off from the little garden outside, because in Islam, God had made man and nature as one, therefore they should live as one. A later different religion walled off the garden because its beauty and the sound of the rippling fountain was a distraction to prayer. People have already asked me which was my favourite place in the Tour. There wasn't one. I must admit that before we left, I sort of thought of Stockholm and Berlin as interesting places to see, between the two places I really wanted to go to, which were Paris and Seville.   What a lovely surprise. I enjoyed them both. However I must admit that If I went back to Sweden, I would stay in Stockholm for a while, then go out into rural Sweden, which, from what I can make of it, is something different again. 

 How do I feel about Berlin? The same as I do about New York. I am glad and fortunate that I went, but now that I have done it, I can tick it off the list and move on.