Malaga

The weekend after my last post I went to Malaga, a beach town a couple hours outside of Sevilla. This was my first non-school-sponsored weekend trip, and my first real bunk bed hostel. Malaga is a small city with fabulous views. There are hills on one side on which sit the Alcazaba (in the family as Sevilla’s Alcazar and Granada’s Alhambra) and another castle. On the other side is the Mediterranean Sea. We spent Friday afternoon (wiped out after our 6:00 AM departure) and Sunday morning (before our train home) on the beach, lying in the “sand” and watching the boats go by. I came very close to jumping in on Sunday (since I was already knee deep), but the prospect of a three-hour train ride with wet clothes was unappealing. We bought baguettes and lunchmeat at the supermarket and had picnics on the beach. Saturday was Día de Andalucía, a very important regional holiday. As a result, several tourist attractions were closed. However, we still got to sightsee, including the Picasso museum (Picasso lived in Málaga until he was ten). The highlight was the bullfight. Oh yes. Because of the holiday, the bullring of Málaga hosted an amateur bullfight, where all the up-and-coming toreadors could do their thing. By pure luck, we walked by and heard the trumpets. Admission was free, so we joined the crowd three rows back.

WARNING: THIS NEXT CHUNK CONTAINS GRAPHIC DETAILS!

This was one of the most intense experiences of my life. General outline of a bullfight: The first step is to tire out the bull. The toreador makes him run around a lot via shaking the red (pink, in this case) cloth. To further weaken the bull, the toreador stabs him between the shoulder blades with these fancy pokers, which decoratively hang from the bull for the rest of the corrida. After running the bull around more to further tire him and give the event suspense, the toreador stabs the bull and kills it. I had this romanticized view of all this; I thought the bull hardly noticed the pokers, had a grand old time playing with the cloth, then the toreador smacked the bull with the sword and it immediately died. Au contraire. When we arrived, the bull already had the pokers hanging. We realized, when we saw the glossy blood covering the bull’s front half, that this was going to be way more intense than the videos we had previously seen. The toreador, who could not have been more than eighteen, continued. At times, perhaps since this was the amateur show, he lost control. There were a couple times that the bull’s horns were perilously close to the boy, which made me quite nervous. The couple of times he dropped his cloth the older toreadors would run out with their own cloths to distract the bull while the toreador found his footing. The brown bull became increasingly bloody as his wounds continued to ooze. He was also making sounds, cries, as he continued to participate. Finally, when the bull was right in front of our section, in a swift movement the toreador inserted his sword all the way between the bull’s shoulder blades. I was horrified but could not look away, and slightly wanted to vomit all over the stadium. I hadn’t realized that the sword goes all the way in!!! I wondered where it went after, looking on the ground, then found it. In fact, this sword happened to go all the way through and poke out the bull’s belly. The bull stayed on foot, moaning this horrible, horrible moan, as blood started pouring out of its lower wound. As the bull cried, blood came rushing out its mouth as well. The beautiful young brown bull in front of us was bleeding out of every orifice, yet so completely alive still. The bull instinctively responded when the toreador waved his cloth for the final time and made its move. The point of this, as shown here, was to make the bull fall, finally. To my pleasure, they soon put the bull out of its misery. While it was on the ground bleeding and crying, two older men came over and wiggled a knife around in the bull’s neck to end it all. It’s legs twitched for a while after. Ugh. The other man sawed off the bull’s ear, a custom to present the toreador with a “trophy.” As they latched the now dead bull to the horse-drawn apparatus to remove it from the stadium, the young toreador proudly walked around the stadium, bowing and waving to his cheering fans, who were waving white handkerchiefs in the air in congratulations. He threw the ear to an adoring fan (a small boy) as the trumpet players played the customary music. The bull disappeared out of the stadium, and other crewmembers ran onto the dirt to shovel up the blood and smooth everything out. We stayed for the second bull. This one was really feisty, and the new toreador lacked the control that the first one had. There were several more incidents where the toreador dropped his cloth, and he had far more near-accidents with the horns than the first one had had. In the end, he had trouble killing it. His first stab missed, and the bull was unscathed enough to have all his faculties and he was REALLY mad. The experts came on, removed the sword, and gave it back to the kid. He was allowed another stab, which was better, but due partly to the sheer mass of the bull, wasn’t as affective as was the first one we witnessed. They counted it as good enough, got the bull of his feet, and the experts finished the job right away.
This was absolutely incredible. Before I left for Spain, a woman told me that her daughter had gone to a bullfight while in Spain. She was horrified, disgusted, and appalled for the first bull. By the end (usually five bulls later) she was standing up and cheering along with the Spaniards. I found this a little hard to believe, but felt a similar transition even in the second bull. I looked around a bit more, and took in the audience. It was mostly families, complete with grandparents and small children, celebrating Dia de Andalusia. I had to admit that I wanted to stay for more bulls. The rest of the group couldn’t take anymore, so we left, but I was already feeling it as a sheer cultural experience. I am SO SO glad that we found this bullfight. It is such a Spanish thing, but I don’t know if I really would have paid at least fifty euros to sit in the farthest, top grandstand at the Plaza de Toros to see a real bullfight. Instead, I got to be about ten feet away from the ring completely for free. This was such an incredible experience that I will absolutely never forget. If I remember, I will post the link to pictures and even videos (don’t worry, the camera was off for the deaths)!

Fotos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2008923&id=1232310007&l=33cb6b300a