Queue Up: Rainy Days and Mondays

We had a macabre start to our Monday. Our planned hike today was canceled due to…wait for it…yep….rain. Or as our British/Italian guide Antonio said “it’s still pissing down rain”. Not sure if I can really repeat that when I get back home, not that I would need to, we live in a desert.

But first, let me catch you up on last night. Peter convinced me to go on one of his crazy “You only have to walk halfway down” photo scouting trips. It then turned in to, “well I don’t really like the view here, and it’s not that far to keep walking down to the next one”. “Let’s go to the next one”. You get the idea. We walked 678 steps down into a steep gorge, photographed for a few minutes and then turned around and walked it all the way back up. It felt like a 30% grade, but Peter said maybe it was 25%. As we were nearing the top, a group of teenagers were walking down, smoking cigarettes, drinking bear, and eating Asian takeout…with chopsticks. Like it was just an everyday stroll for them. And just to add insult to injury, before the “short walk”, I had washed my hair and dressed for dinner. Now I was sweaty, my hair frizzy, and my internal body temperature was nearing 200 F from the exertion. After 22 years of marriage I can’t believe I still fall for it.

Now onto today. So we started the day with a discussion about bullfighting in Spain. There is nothing that says “welcome to the new week”, quite like a detailed description of blood sport. It was an interesting juxtaposition that Jim chose to use the children’s book The Story of Ferdinand (also a major motion picture by the way). How they created an 108 minute length movie out of a two paragraph story is nothing short of mind-scrambling and it’s about the history of what some would characterize as a cruel animal sport.

Here is what I can remember from Jim’s thorough and excellent description (he may be reading this blog now by the way….so well…take from that what you will). Bulls and bullfighters are like celebrities, they travel with entourages. A bull has serious FOMO, if his mom and friends go on a trip, he wants to go to. That is how they get him to the bullring.

The birthplace of modern bullfighting happened here in Ronda, when a guy named Pedro Rodrigues tried to save his master by waving his cape at a bull. There are many theories as to why the cape is red, and it’s not because bulls are agitated by the color red, they are color blind. The most popular theory is that the color red hides all the blood from the bull and matador should either one of them come in contact with it. I mean really, spectators are attending a blood sport and the promoters are worried about a little blood on a cape? Just sayin’. No photos were allowed in the museum or I would have also shared some images of the matador’s flamboyant outfits.

Ronda now has bullfights only 1 week out of the year and they are thinking of canceling even those. Not because of any moral or ethical reason, but because they make more money during that week from the tourist admission tickets they sell all day long. I guess people are really curious to see the bullring even if nothing is happening.

Selecting a bull for a bullfight is a huge game of chance. You have to find a bull that wants to fight, but you can’t test that first. He gets smart fast, and if you fight a bull a second time he’ll kill anyone who tries. So someone has to play-fight the bull’s mom as a proxy. Parenting is a thankless job.

The spectacle of bullfighting is all about the matador giving the impression he is in control of the bull….but he never really is. Such an odd sport with a combination of theater, skill, and chance.

That’s it in a very abbreviated nutshell, welcome to Monday.

We walked around the town a bit, and then headed over to Bodega Descalzos Viejos. It’s a small winery that makes 3,300 cases of wine a year. After a short tour from the owner and his colleague, oh and Dimitri the cat (a cat raised by dogs, that now acts like a dog), we had a wine tasting and sandwiches in the wine cave among 16th century frescos. The frescos were uncovered during the restoration of a monastery. Well, first it was a convent, then a hermitage, and then a monastery. It gave a whole new meaning to visiting the wine gods.

As I write this it looks like there could be snow flurries mixed in with the rain. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

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