the weekend

My first week of class is done. I’m already 1/3 done with a 3 credit class. During Friday’s class we learned about the history of Spain. It made me really want to visit the city of Cadiz on the coast an hour south of Sevilla. It’s the oldest city in Europe, over 3000 years old and it has been home to about 10 different civilizations. For the last hour of our three hour class we went to a big market nearby to learn words for all the types of fish, fruit and vegetables sold there.

A Starbucks about 200 feet from my house opened for business on Tuesday. Right next door is a convenience store with a little café and grocery store that is open late every day. Right next to that is a McDonalds. The back door to the McDonalds is directly across the street from my bedroom window on the ground floor. The street is a narrow, quiet one-way street and the only noise I get is from the McDonald’s workers taking out the trash and talking outside during their breaks. It’s a little ironic that I came all the way to Spain… and I live right behind a McDonalds and a Starbucks. Americanization is everywhere.

I went to Plaza Alfalfa on Friday night, the streets and sidewalks are always packed yet people still try to drive down the narrow streets there. I woke up for breakfast and then went back to bed. Two friends of mine went to the Plaza de Toros (bull ring) to buy 20 tickets for the bullfight on Sunday.

On Saturday afternoon we walked to a really big internet café where we all go to hang out and use the computers occasionally. From there five of us went to the train station and took a train to the town of Utrera about 30 minutes away. Utrera had its feria (fair) this weekend. We had to walk to the other side of the town to get to the fairgrounds. The town was eerily quiet, we later realized that everyone was at the feria. About half of the fairgrounds was filled with casetas (little houses and tents) set up by restaurants, businesses, churches, and political parties that were packed with people dancing, singing, eating and drinking. Flamenco dancing was going on everywhere. We hardly saw any other tourists and almost all of the women were wearing traditional flamenco dresses and some of the men were wearing the traditional black pants, black heeled shoes and loose dress shirt. A lot of little kids were dressed up too. The other half of the fairgrounds was the typical carnival stuff, rides, games, cotton candy and ice cream and lots of bright lights and loud music. We had tapas and drank tinto de verano (red wine with lemon or orange soda). We also went on one ride. We ran back to the train station to catch the last train back at 11:05 pm. Tons of people got off the train coming from Sevilla, the feria really gets going late at night. It was a busy and fun feria for a small town, I can’t imagine what the Sevilla feria is going to be like in April. The stories I’ve heard about it are unbelievable.

We got back to Sevilla around 11:30 and went out to a few places I hadn’t been to yet near my house. On Sunday I slept a lot, had a late lunch and then went off to the bull ring. There was about 40 or 50 people that I know at the bullfight, it was our last chance to see a bullfight in Sevilla until next spring so almost everyone in my program went. All of the americans there (there were a lot) had no idea what was going on and some had a hard time watching. I was really into it, I was excited to get to see a bullfight after reading a book about it recently.

In a poster store the other day I was browsing through a pile of old bullfight posters and I recognized the name of a bullfighter on one of them, Paquirri, from the book I read and then realized that the poster was from the bullfight in Pozoblanco in 1984 where he was killed. It was a weird coincidence that took my breath away for a second – I had just read about this guy and now I was staring at the poster for his last bullfight. The book, Death and the Sun, focuses on Paquirri’s son, Francisco, a current bullfighter, and the ups and downs of his season in 2002. Francisco is still a popular bullfighter, he was in the news recently because his mother had died and he is considering retiring from bullfighting.

The toreros today were novillos (junior bullfighters), so the tickets were cheap. Mine was only 10 euros for the fourth row in the sun. We weren’t in the sun for very long, though, it got dark and chilly pretty fast. The stands were half full and the crowd was about half spaniards and half tourists. The first torero (bullfighter) was very young and small. Everything went wrong with the first bull. It flipped the picador’s horse, nearly killing it, and later the bull knocked the torero to the ground, he wasn’t injured but he did have trouble killing the bull. The second bull was the biggest one, a beautiful black bull. The second torero was a really tall young-looking guy and he did really well. The third bull was another big black bull and the third torero seemed very talented. We saw two great performances with the second and third bulls. The fourth bull was ugly and scrawny and would not charge the picador’s horse. The crowd whistled and jeered so the bull was sent back and replaced by a decent bull. The fourth and sixth bulls were difficult to kill and not very good performances, but the fifth bull was a good one and the tall torero did another good job with it. I wonder if the taurine critics will write about this bullfight for the papers tomorrow, it would be interesting to see what they say.

I took a lot of pictures of the feria and the bull fight but I may have to go to an internet café tomorrow to upload them, the internet connection at home is slow and the wireless signal is much weaker in my room.

Happy birthday Dad!