Side tangent: being back in Madrid and staying put for 36 hours gave me a much-needed opportunity to do laundry. In my first-ever experience of hand-washing clothes, I think I did pretty well using the sink and bathtub and some travel-sized Tide packets I brought along. It was super convenient that I had a five-bed hostel room to myself, as well, because I was able to take over the entire space and put wet clothes on hangers dangling from other bunks, the TV, the bathroom door, etc. Everything took forever to dry, but a success, I'd say.
Anyway, so on Thursday the 27th I took a noon train from Madrid to Toledo. It was on the high-speed rail and so we made a 180km distance in a solid 45 minutes, which was pretty nice. Knowing I didn't have a whole lot of time in Toledo (I'd scheduled a 7:25pm train back to Madrid) I headed straight into the city center to look at the Alcazar and the Cathedral. 
Toledo was really pretty in the sense that it really hasn't expanded outside the historic center; there are no ugly, drab suburbs. Instead, once you cross the old bridge and climb a trillion steps, you can look outwards from the city walls and see rolling fields and orchards and farms. Of course, I understate the task of getting up said trillion steps. In coming up with a defend-able position, the Visigothic kings decided to build Toledo on top of a semi-mountain, so getting into the city and then moving around it is no easy task. I was constantly going up and down, up and down, so I got a pretty good workout in. First thing I went to the Alcazar, the former fortress-turned-military museum. Kind of like the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Alcazar is built on top of a bunch of ruins; in this case, Roman/medieval/Islamic/Reconquista ruins. Every ruling party built additions to the original fortifications until after Ferdinand and Isabella, when a palace/fortress in more the Renaissance and then Baroque style was added. That building was almost completely obliterated during a 3-month siege during the Spanish civil war, and so they took the opportunity for the new building to really showcase the ruins beneath. The whole building is now on top of massive steel pillars that go into the ruins, so that while five stories worth of museum are above you, you can see across a massive open space with the towers and fortress remnants below you. I love museums that are built like this, so that even the building itself is a museum.Turned out the Alcazar was a great choice for me to start the day, as they had a really great collection of military items threaded into the overall history of Spain. I spent an hour and a half in one room alone that went through the history of the reconquista from 732 to 1492. One of the cooler items on display was El Cid's sword. I then quickly snaked my way through the remaining four floors, since I didn't want to spend my entire time in Toledo in one place.
My second stop was the massive Toledo cathedral; as a town that was reconquered in 1085, Toledo's Catholic archdiocese took on great importance early on to the Spanish Church. Along with Burgos and Leon, Toledo's cathedral is supposed to be one of the three most important cathedrals in Spain. I went in with my audioguide and looked around for a bit; all the cathedrals are kind of running together in my mind at this point, but I enjoyed the Toledo one because of a) it's massive size and b) the shape. The main altar is at the front, surrounded by a circular ambulatory that's made to resemble the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Christ was buried. It had really great natural light, and so the altar space was really pretty. Once again, I didn't spend too long here since I was only in Toledo for five or six hours. Lastly, I walked through a neighborhood strewn with tourist souvenir shops and cheesy sword stores to get to the Sephardic Museum and Sinagoga del Transito. This one is another of the three pre-Inquisition synagogues that are still intact today, kind of like the Sinagoga I went to in Cordoba. This one was a bit bigger, but had a lot of the same Mudejar artwork and visual elements. The Sephardic Museum, unfortunately, wasn't translated into English so I just walked through it's few rooms without really knowing what I was looking at. I knew a fair amount about the Spain's Sephardic Jews and where they went after Ferdinand & Isabella kicked them out though; so I could at least put a little bit together.
After seeing those three sites, I walked back through town, got some ice cream, and walked back to the train station. Once back in Madrid, I got dinner and read my book with some wine back in Plaza Mayor.
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