The Corrida

Corrida, that's the word for a bullfight. I went to my first (last?) bullfight last night. Felix (my French roommate, don’t worry, he’ll have an entry to himself in a little bit) has his brother, his brother’s Canadian friend and his brother's Canadian friend’s Canadian girlfriend (they’re lawyers, we talked about lawyerly things. Oh and they’re the English Canada kind of Canadian, not the quebecois stuff) visiting for the weekend. The bullfights aren’t always in Valencia, they’re only here for a week this summer (they come back in March), so we figured we’d go see it while we had the chance.

During the World Cup games, Spaniards marched around with their Spanish flags: red and yellow with a coat of arms on the middle stripe, justified a little bit to the left (that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word outside of Microsoft Word). Some flags, however, were different. Instead of a coat of arms, some flags featured a giant silhouette of a bull covering the entire middle third of the flag. The bull, Spain’s national icon, is far more intimidating than any coat of arms. I mean, if anyone could ever really be intimidated by a flag. Come on! (The GOB version.)

The most prominent American symbol is the bald eagle right? If there was such a thing as a bald eagle ring, I’d go in a second. Anyone who could kill an eagle with a sword (assuming it’s flying the hell away from you) should get to kill one, even if it’s endangered. That’s how many Spanish feel about bulls and bullfighting. It’s a 150 pound man against a 1,200 pound bull. If the guy can kill it without getting gored, then good for him. Plus, people eat the meat afterwards so it’s not like it’s a waste.

The only problem with that ideology is that it’s flawed. It’s not man versus beast, it’s men versus beast. About a dozen people combine to kill the bull, the first few tiring him out, the next few stabbing him with smaller dart-like lances, then a few guys on horses trot in to stab him a few more times from their lofty perches (while the horses get the manure gored out of them; don’t worry, they wear armor, even though I don’t know how much it helps), before the torero, Mr. Matador himself comes trotting into the ring in his sequin-covered, pink and white skin-tight costume for the final kill. After the bull’s been bleeding for a good ten minutes, the matador tires him out a little more with his “ole”-ing before killing the bull and exiting stage left. Or right, it’s a circle, so it depends on where you’re sitting. Oh and you’re apparently only supposed to yell “ole” when the matador does an impressive sequence of passes. Basically if it was the Olympics and you felt he should get above an 8.5 or higher for style points in getting the bull to miss the cloth, then you should yell it.

So anyway, the bullfight. We settled into our wooden seats in the front row of the uppermost balcony in probably the oldest building in the city (okay, it’s Spain, it’s probably like, the twelfth oldest, but it’s still old). I sat between the Canadian (we’ll call him…Franklin) and an older gentleman from just outside Valencia who’s a season ticket holder. His name is Vicente. He, of course, started talking to me. Franklin is pretty curious in general, so I became the translator for question after question (yes, some were my own questions) and relayed them onto everyone else.

After the first bull was killed (the matador basically got booed out of the ring—booing in Spanish is actually whistling—for doing such a poor job. Basically, it’s supposed to be fairly swift in the grand scheme of things, and without getting into graphic detail I’ll just say that this first kill was anything but) Vicente explained that they’re taking the bull out back behind the bullring and butchering it on the spot, pointing to where it takes place. A few bulls later (there were six in this event) the Canadian and the two Frenchmen wanted to go see it, and Vicente was happy to lead the way. I didn’t go, and I’m glad I didn’t. Franklin and Vicente came back a few minutes later, Franklin was sweating profusely and didn’t stop sweating the rest of the bullfight. It was a very cool evening by Valencia’s standards. He described what was went on behind the bullring and how it would exceed my expectations of disgustingness (including more details that I won’t share). I’ll be sure to ask him how his nightmares were last night.

Anyway, if the folks in the stands are impressed with a matadors performance, they frantically wave white handkerchiefs/newspapers and, if enough do it, the judge is forced to give the matador a trophy. What are the trophies? The options are: one ear, two ears, or two ears and the tail. Two ears or two ears and a tail are entirely at the discretion of the judge, but if enough people start waving their newspapers around, the judge guy is forced to give the matador at least an ear. Now, only the 19-year-old got an ear after his first fight, because frankly he was really really good at what he was doing. Each matador went twice, and the young guy was very last. Again, he was particularly good (or the other two were just not really good), the crowd went nuts, and he got another ear. What does two ears mean? Well apparently it means that you do a victory lap around the inside of the ring and then, in the cheesiest move of all time, you get the honor of being carried out of the ring into the Plaza de Toros of whatever city you’re in to the adoration of everyone, except for the PETA-style folks who are protesting outside. And by the adoration of everyone I mean everyone over 50. We were legitimately the only people in the whole place who were under 50 years old. I mean, watching the guy get carried out was cool I guess, but it felt like it was the end of a bad 80s movie where it freezes on the kid with his fist in the air as he's carried off after sweeping the legs or something and then they roll the credits underneath the still shot. So anyway, this teenager gets carried out on some guy's shoulders, gets to the street, and then gets tossed into a van with his name on it like Will Ferrell’s his pledgemaster, and the van goes speeding off.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is a halfway decent summary of a bullfight, minus the part where I tell you about how one bull bled profusely out of his mouth because the first matador was so terrible that the thing suffocated on its own blood. Oh! I said I wasn’t going to explain that part. Sorry!


P.S. Felix and his brother went again the next night and took 629 pictures (seriously). A matador the next night actually got tossed (not gored) by a bull (I wish I had seen it live, I was waiting outside for them so we could get dinner and there was just a huge collective groan from the crowd, I was pretty sure someone died). They have a great picture of it and I'll post it here when I get it from them.

Pamplona and Barcelona

I'll have a write up of my four days in Pamplona and Barcelona soon. But for now enjoy this video I put together.

Why I Haven't Really Been Updating

This was written in early July, I thought I would end up writing more before posting, I didn’t. And it was written a few weeks after some of the events, which is why some of it is short on details.
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As I said below, most of my time has been taken up from “working” (I’m not going to get into that) and watching the World Cup, which is conveniently on at 4 and 8:30 pm here. Anyway, now that we’re into the semi-finals and there’s some time off until the next round, I figured I should get back on the Microsoft Word grind (sorry Pages!) and churn something out.

So first, I discovered an American bar here in Valencia and figured it would be the prime viewing place for the U.S. games. Before the Slovenia game, Germany was playing Serbia, so I showed up a little bit after halftime of that game. It was packed. With Germans. There were probably fifty depressed Germans, which is shocking because Germans don’t have emotions (right?) by the end of that game. It was the first time they’d lost a group game since the Weimar Republic or something. There was no burning of wheelbarrows full of money after this one though.

When that game ended, there were three people left in the bar. It was me, another American from Ohio, and the guy behind the bar. A few more people filtered in as the game started, but there were only about five or six of us in all. We were surprisingly optimistic at halftime (although I was asking myself why I subject myself to this kind of disappointment as a serious fan), ecstatic when we took the lead, pissed off when it was taken away, and overall just happy to still have a chance to move on to the second round.

The next game, against Algeria, was on at the same time as the England game. I figured that the American bar would have it for sure. In fact, it was the only bar in town that had the game. On my walk over I stood awkwardly at a crosswalk with a guy in an Algeria jersey. He was probably the only person in the city wearing an Algeria jersey and I happened to walk up next to him at a crosswalk. You figure out the odds. Once at the bar, the game had to be streamed via computer onto the screen, because the U.S. game was on PPV (the England game on the regular provider, there’s no ESPN/ESPN2 setup here for multiple games at the same time).

With multiple screens in the place, us Americans settled in the back, joined by about ten students from UVA who were studying abroad for the summer. The front half of the bar was packed entirely with English fans, which made for a fascinating atmosphere at the end of the games.

The first half went off fine, the stream worked, only there was no audio. England took the lead fairly early in their game, making an American goal even more important. Altidore missed a wide open net, Dempsey hit the post. Everyone was frustrated. One kid from UVA even asked where Algeria was (really UVA? I thought you had higher standards than that). But, once the second half was fully underway the stream began freezing up, and by the 85th minute in the England game (which was also roughly the same minute in the American game) our stream was only at the 68th minute. Reloading did nothing to help our cause. We knew if anyone scored, we’d hear it on the England broadcast. Finally in the 90th minute, as depression set in, we told the guy in charge of the computer to just turn it off and bring up ESPN.com. As he did, I saw Mike (the American from Ohio, who was at the Slovenia game), look at his iPhone, jerk his had back like he’d seen something bizarre, and then covered his phone and looked around, only whispering to the person next to him “I think we just scored.”

ESPN.com came up on the TV. Front and center it said something along the lines of “Desperation” but the score read 1-0. Only the font was so small that 1) nobody recognized that it didn’t say 0-0 and 2) I wasn’t sure who had the 1 and who had the 0. Using my fantastic vision, I made out that it said USA 1. Mike had checked his phone again and jumped out of his seat screaming, then I yelled “It’s one nothing!” and our entire half of the bar went absolutely nuts. About two seconds later the page reloaded and read “Donovan Strike!” The England game had ended before ours, so their chanting was interrupted by our madness (and our stereotypical “USA! USA!” chant straight out of Lake Placid 1980) and me yelling to an English guy named Lee (whom I had met a few times before) “We won the group!” to which an improptu “we won the group” chant started. It was by far the happiest bar in town. Both sets of fans saw their teams move on, and not a single person had actually seen the American goal happen, even though it was probably the biggest goal in American soccer history, outside of Gregg Berhalter’s goal against Germany in the 2002 quarterfinals. (Oh, wait. http://www.sikids.com/photos/24199/pinnacle-moments-in-world-cup-history/19).

The Ghana game was the first time the U.S. played at night here. The bar was packed with all kinds of people, and the Spanish were clearly on our side. Another early goal in the first half for Ghana, an electric atmosphere in the second half after the entire place fell quiet waiting for Donovan to step up for his PK. There was nothing left in anyone’s tank when Ghana retook the lead in extra time (see the picture above), the entire place was morose, save the random English guy in the background of that picture. He’d get his the next day against Germany. I took off my Steve Cherundolo jersey, put it around my neck, and walked home. A Spanish guy was playing some sort of upbeat tune on his bugle at some party (yeah, they do that kind of stuff here) as I walked past an apartment building. It may as well have been taps to me. At least I still had Spain, who themselves were playing terribly.
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Coming Up Next: Spain’s World Cup run, my (brief) experience at the running of the bulls and the San Fermin festival in Pamplona (read: Spanish Mardi Gras), my commentary on how no one in Spain speaks Spanish, the hilarity of my French roommate, and the recent addition of another roommate from Bulgaria, who I'm pretty sure is a gypsy that is trying to steal our souls.