On my last evening in Córdoba I got to see a corrida de toros -- a bullfight. I'd wanted to experience the 300 year old relic of Spanish tradition since I'd come to Spain, but could never gather the moral self-assurance to act on my curiosity. I felt wrong giving financial support to a sport -- or is it an art? -- that cheers on the bloody death of innocent, disadvantaged animals.

Toreros, asesinos -- bullfighters, murderers -- was graffitied
in several places on the outside of the ring.

But, as is usually the case, my curiosity got the better of me. Not only is bullfighting an integral part of Spanish culture, but I realized that for me at least, the very fact that it would be hard for me to watch was the reason I needed to see it. A few months before Federico García Lorca's 1936 execution, he wrote one of his famous plays La casa de Bernarda Alba, in which the domineering title character proclaims, "Y no quiero llantos. La muerte hay que mirarla cara a cara." -- "And I don't want to hear any crying. Death must be confronted face to face."

Death is a natural part of life, I figured. If I can eat animals daily, I should be able to stomach watching them die from hundreds of feet away.

That evening I walked to the bullring with my friends Josh, Mary and Fatima.


We had paid 10 euros and little thought to the spectacle we'd soon see and probably never forget. Of course we knew that bulls would die in front of us, but I don't think any of us had wanted to imagine what that might actually look like.

In the modern bullfight, the man-bull interaction is divided into three main phases. In the beginning, the bull gallops out into the ring, each one of the six beasts bigger and more aggressive than the last. A few men stand around using pink capes to attract the bull's attention, then run away like the physically puny species we are when it charges at them. (Contrary to popular belief, it's the movement of the cape -- not the color of it -- that gets the bull to charge.) Eventually the bull gets annoyed by this fruitless game, and rams the closest horse. Unfortunately (for the bull) the horse is well-protected by some kind of thick padding, and is mounted by a man who proceeds to jab his spear into the area behind the bull's head.

Notice that the horse is blindfolded.

But the nape of the bull's neck hasn't been tenderized nearly enough yet. In phase two, three of the men leave behind their pink capes and pick up a pair of colorful knives. As the bull charges each one, he jumps aside at the last second and drives both knives into the same spot on the bull's back. This picture (not taken by me) shows the result:


Now, with the bull panting and bleeding, he is weak enough for a single man to go cara a cara with him. This third phase of the bullfight is the most renowned. The color red takes center stage, as the torero's red cape tantalizes the bull over and over again until one final charge, when the bull's exasperated sprint comes up with nothing but air and a sword driven down to the hilt in its back.

Of the four bulls we watched die, the majority tended to react to this fatal blow by walking around in a daze for a few moments, then slowly retreating from the men to die on its own. It would become obviously exhausted and start spitting up blood.


When it neared the very end of its life it would let out a few heartwrending groans and sit down, with an almost docile air. Finally, and mercifully, it would keel over onto its side:


The torero with the red cape then kneels over the bull and takes it out of its misery by repeatedly stabbing it in the same, softened bloody spot. After the bull's body stops its macabre writhing the torero slices off an ear as a kind of trophy for a fight well done. And the crowd goes wild.

The brutality of time

Today I left Córdoba, abruptly abandoning the most blissful four months I will ever live. The last few days have been a tropical storm of unabated joy and anxious anticipation of the day we could never imagine coming.

Last Thursday I went to the opening night of Córdoba's renowned week-long festival, Feria.


The sudden midnight illumination of the fairground's Mezquita-inspired facade was magical;


but a rare cold, driving rain stole the night. I can count the number of rainy days I've seen in Andalucía on one hand, but the timing of the weather that night was entirely appropriate for the circumstances. (Maybe there's a reason the Spanish word 'tiempo' means both "time" and "weather.") The low-key night ended somberly, as my friend Matt was to leave Córdoba early the next morning.

Two days later I went on an unforgetable hike through the hills of Córdoba with my friends Mary, Mareva, Amanda and my new Spanish friend Ricardo.


The pinnacle of the day was when Richy and I reached the summit of a prohibitively steep hill which we probably shouldn't have tried to scale.


A few minutes later, we came across an old, 1930's country house that must have been bombed out during the Spanish Civil War.


These days, Nature lives there.


This fantastical experience, too, would soon become that fantastical experience.



After countless hours of hiking the group's patience began to wear thin. We walked back to Richy's house and took a dip in his pool to cleanse our bodies of the dusty, sweaty itch that one inevitably feels after a day of walking through the maleza -- undergrowth -- of the countryside.

(This word maleza is incredibly telling in light of the passage I recently read in Lorca's Bodas de Sangre, in which a farmer talks about his lifelong "battle against the weeds, the thistles, and the rocks that come from who knows where." The interesting thing is that the word belleza -- "beauty" -- comes from bella -- "beautiful." If mal means "bad", shouldn't maleza translate to something like "badness", instead of "undergrowth"?)

It was the second time I had been to Richy's house, in Córdoba's El Brillante ("The Brilliant") neighborhood overlooking the city.


The swim that day was deeply therapeutic, like writing this post has been for me tonight. There is much more to come...

Lenny Kravitz comes to Córdoba, and inspires his fans all over again

Do you remember when we were in elementary school and Lenny Kravitz came out with his airy, fantastical hit ''Fly Away''?

''I want to get away, I wanna flyyyy awayyyy, yeaahhh yeahhh yeaaahhh!''

Yeah, you remember that one.

He was pretty cool; at least I thought so. When's the last time you thought about him? Yeah, I don't know either.

Well, in an inexplicably random collision of times and spaces from two very different eras of my life, Lenny Kravitz came to play a concert in Córdoba this past Sunday night. I was unwilling to pay the 40 euro entry fee, but I had heard it was possible to see or at least enjoy the outdoor concert from outside the venue, so I went and met my friend Mareva there. I didn't regret it.

Indeed, it was difficult to see much of Lenny that night. Crowds of equally frugal Spaniards hovered around areas where the tarp covering the chain-link fence had been ripped, eager to match the sight with the music. Mareva and I mostly hung out across the street, where we could sit and chill while still reaping the full effect of the massive concert speakers. On occasion, when Lenny went into a sweet solo (his ''Stairway of Heaven'' cover comes to mind) or a song we liked, we would walk up to the fence. I soon realized how easy it was to scale the 15-foot fence and perch myself on the top. It also would have been easy to drop down on the other side, but I didn't think it right to ditch Mareva. How gentlemanly of me, right?

This was my view from atop the fence:



Even from the outside looking in I loved the concert, and I gained a newfound respect for Lenny Kravitz and his rock star stage presence. He negotiated the awkward foreign-crowd dynamic as best he could, offering a ''¡buenas noches!'' and ''¿que tal?'' here and there, and taking in stride the dead silence that followed his impassioned ''Can you hear me?!''

But as much as I liked the concert enough to revive Kravitz's presence in my iTunes library, my newfound admiration for the Spanish people was the big souvenir I took away from this amazing night. I have never in my life seen such an energetic, enthusiastic, responsive and grateful crowd as the one I saw that night. You know how usually at concerts people put their arms up and wave them for like half a song, or just when they get really excited, and then put them down again soon after? Not this crowd. It was moving and cheering all night, and when it came near to the end they compelled Lenny Kravitz to come back for not one, but two encores! (I've never seen that either.) Between his last song and the encores, half the crowd would wave both arms back and forth towards the stage, as if bowing to the man. The people who weren't physically praising him were doing the Spanish encore clap -- a lively, Flamenco-based beat of thirds. CLAPclapclapCLAPclapclapCLAPclapclap.

In this picture you can strain to see part of the pulsating wave of appreciative arms (look near the big flush of light at the left of the stage; now imagine that over the entire crowd you saw in the picture above):



But my appreciation of Spanish youth was not to end quite yet. It being a relatively small venue and still too early to go home, Mareva and I decided to hang around to see if we could see Lenny leaving the stadium to board his tour bus.

About an hour and a half or two hours later, it was us and about 10 other Spaniards our age. Most of the other band members had come out, stopping with varying degrees of begrudgery to pose with eager, camera wielding fans. The exit gate was mostly blocked by a large truck that was backed up in it. It was a constant race to guess which side of the truck Lenny would come out on. Suddenly a man walked out of the gate on our side of the truck, and the Spaniards around us went berserk. Apparently it was a famous Spanish actor who grew up in Córdoba. Oops, didn't recognize him. And an actor he was. And by actor, I mean decoy. The bus had pulled up perpendicular with the front of the truck so that its front door was on our side of the truck and its back door on the other side. All of a sudden there was a commotion on the other side of the truck -- Lenny was coming out on that side. As the ten of us moved toward the narrow stretch inbetween bus and truck to get to Lenny's side, a security guard suddenly apparated, clogging the space before us and pushing us back. Some of the more fanatical fans were really upset; I found myself more amused at their reactions and impressed at the seamless execution of Lenny's team.

The saga continued. Lenny proceeded to sit tantalizingly on his bus for at least a half hour, inviting the mostly unsatistfied fans to mill around bugging his driver, knocking on the tinted windows, and watching the most desperate fans do generally ridiculous things. One girl started pushing all the buttons and turning all the knobs she could find on the outside of the bus, in some sardonic attempt to open its door. One girl walked around the bus wailing in heavily accented English unbelievable things which the rest of us just stood around laughing goodnaturedly at, such as, ''Lenny!!! I need you! I will lose my job without you! Please, Lenny, help me!!!'' She seemed to be in her own world. All of this was funny, and probably could have been found anywhere.

But what it evolved into was uniquely Spanish. The teenage Spaniards started singing traditional Spanish songs in front of the driver's window, the climax coming when they began to dance the traditional Andalucían sevillanas dance. Turn up your volume and enjoy:





After this, Lenny must have told his bus driver he'd do autographs, because the driver opened the door and started taking pieces of paper from people. I happily took advantage of what my Spanish companions' cultural exclamation had reaped, and got in on the autograph party. Though we couldn't see him behind the bus' cockpit curtain, I can only imagine that Lenny was a little bit tickled by his fans' enthusiasm. The bus driver wasn't too happy, but what can ya do?



Yes, the Spanish people are a happy one, even in desperate times. Last night my host mom and I were watching a TV show which features musical performances from Spanish music stars of the 70's and 80's. At the end of one song, the band's singer took the microphone and told the audience, essentially, ''I know everyone is going through hard times right now. But when you hear my music I want you to dance and forget about your troubles.''

Amen to that.