Tomatina in Buñol

The Tomatina in Buñol is a tomato fight with about 40,000 people in a teeny tiny town with teeny tiny streets. About 39,900 of the people are college age students.

Several large trucks drive through the streets that are packed full of people and dump tomatoes - thousands of people and millions of tomatoes. We were fortunate to find a plaza which was in the thick of the tomatina yet up a couple of steps and set back a bit. Just 20 feet from us ... there was a wall of people. If you managed to push your way into the crowd, you could lift your feet without falling because you were held up by the all people around you.

Most of the buildings had their doors and windows boarded up and had tarps draped from the ground to the roof. A few wimps watched the tomato fight from the roofs of their buildings ... though several people, including my brother Eugene, were determined to "include" them and threw tomatoes and t-shirts up 3 or 4 stories. This is Eugene and Jolie prepared for the tomatoes.

There were just a couple of rules (which were poorly translated into English). You are supposed to "press" the tomatoes before you throw them and you cannot "quit" your shirt. Most people didn't understand the rules or didn't follow them (or both). If someone did not take their own shirt off, others tried to rip it off. Many young women were wearing only remnants of their shirts by the end of the tomatina. Nobody tried to rip my shirt off ... because I was wearing overalls.
The tomato trucks came and tomatoes started flying. Actually, not just tomatoes flew. Shirts, shoes, other clothing articles, water, sangria, sandwiches, etc. also flew. If something wasn't secured, it was not safe. A few boys were hanging onto an electrical box on the side of a building. The electrical box was hanging by the end of the tomatina.

After they called the end of the fight, Matthew thought the coast was clear. It wasn't.

Photos from previous years showed the tomato "soup" in the street to be knee deep. They must have improved their sewer system. This year, the tomato soup only got about ankle deep. So, our dreams of swimming in tomatos went unrealized.

There were five portable toilets ... near the entrance of the city area. We later found another one tucked behind and between some buildings. At first I thought this was absolutely crazy. Later, I realized that there was no possible way to navigate through the crowd to get to a toilet anyway ... so why bother? It didn't smell like urine so either people held it or the tomatoes neutralized the smell.

There were very, very few touristy type booths selling junk at ridiculous prices. Near the train station, there were a few selling disposable underwater cameras at 12 euros each ($18) and t-shirts (which people needed to get back on the train at the end of the day). Otherwise, nothing. At first, I thought ... "This is cool! The Tomatina hasn't been overrun with cheap souvenirs!" Later, I realized that if there had been booths near the city area ... they would have been crushed by the throngs of people and their merchandise thrown into the tomato fight.

Our souvenirs are our stained clothing and tomato seeds and skins that we'll find in our hair and in orifices of our body for the next few weeks.

Yana, Kerline, and I stayed until the end of the day. By 6 pm, the town still smelled of tomatoes but it was dead. We went into a pub. There was one table of boys who were buying time until they could drive in a relatively straight line. Other than that, there were 20 elderly gentlemen (locals) playing or watching table games. The streets were empty and sort of clean. Even after they swept, fire hosed, and ran through with a street cleaner ... there were t-shirts hanging over the power lines and tomato skins and seeds stuck in the cobblestones of the street.

People were taking their tarps down and unboarding their windows and doors. We saw a crew with an aerial lift (cherry picking truck) driving through the streets taking clothing items off the power lines. One woman was spraying the little window of her front door with window cleaner and scrubbing it vigorously ... while her painted wooden door and stucco building were stained shades of red.

You might think the locals hate it. But, we met a woman on the train who grew up in Buñol and she still comes back to her parents to see the Tomatina every year. Her 11 y.o. son loves it. You gotta love it - it is the biggest tomato fight in the world!!

Barcelona

We ate tapas. We took leisurely walks in the "afternoon" (10 pm at night) and stopped to have a meal consisting of different appetizers. What a good idea! It is a great way of trying new things without getting stuck with a big plate of food you don't like but feel obligated to eat because you paid for it.

Years ago, Matthew and I had tapas for the first time. We stopped at what seemed to be a fancy restaurant and we were astonished at the low prices ... until our orders arrived on teeny tiny plates with two or three bites of food on them. We had our few bites and then left the restaurant confused and not very pleased. Years later, we learned what tapas meant and now we have sincerely gained an appreciation for tapas.

We strolled the Rambla. Think of a rambla as a place you can ramble (to move about aimlessly). Ramblas are super-duper wide boulevards that people walk on. They are usually between the two lanes of a street (like a boulevard) though sometimes there are no streets and it is just a walkway.

Ramblas are very common in Spain. In Barcelona, the main rambla is filled street performers, shops, and people. The kids loved all the street performers and could have spent a whole day on the Rambla. There was quite a variety of street performers ... statues, dancers, puppeteers, pranksters, etc. The last one we saw was a man painted green who sucked his stomach way way in and then moved his muscles. I wasn't very impressed so I didn't take a picture. A few blocks later, Elena stopped, lifted her shirt to show her stomach, and did the same thing as the stomach-sucking performer. Suddenly, I thought it was really cool. But, we could not convince Elena to do it on the Rambla.

We saw our friend Cristal. Cristal shares one of the greatest blessings in our life - our friend, Katiuska (Katty) Gonzalez. Last year, Cristal and her friend, Edgar, invited us to Spain (one of the requirements of the residential visa application). We may not be in Spain if it had not been for Cristal and Edgar.

We climbed up to Castillo de Montjuïc and walked down through Olympic Village. The castle was pretty cool and most of it was free. Olympic Village wasn't nearly as cool as we imagined. Sidewalks were not maintained and some almost completely washed away. Much of the area seemed deserted, overgrown, and not really being utilized. If Chicago hosts the 2016 Olympics, I sure hope they design it to be useful after the olympics are over.


We experienced the Magic Fountain. The Magic Fountain is water, lights, colors and music coordinated together. It is amazing to watch ... especially when you consider that it was built in 1929 before modern technology that could make it easier. [Some websites and tourist books say that the Magic Fountain runs every 30 minutes. After waiting almost an hour, we were told that it starts at 9 pm. The color, water, and light show started at 9 pm and the music chimed in at about 9:20 pm.]

Gaudí. We went to see Casa Batllo and Sagrada Familia ... both from the outside where it was free. We also walked up and down and in and out and through Parc Güell. That was really cül. I used to think that the word gaudy originated from the description of Antonio Gaudí's architecture. It didn't. Gaudí's architecture appears gaudy in pictures but it looks and feels really impressive when you're there.

Gaudí began building the Sagrada Familia church but died before he finished (construction continues today). One of his goals for the church architecture was to inspire people to look up toward heaven. It worked.

Finally, we went swimming and we had the beach to ourselves!