Friday I went with my host sister Marine, three of her friends, and my friend Benjamin. We got there around seven o'clock and walked around checking out the sights before sitting down in a bodèga for dinner. The bodègas are little restaurants run by people supporting a charity or regular restaurants that need to defend themselves from five days of absolutely no business. Typically they all have:
- paellas - a huge plate of yummy yellow rice, chicken, shrimp, mussels, calamares, and some vegetables which is cooked in enormous pans,
- gardiane - a beef stew cooked with black olive and served with either white or local Camarguaise rice (you'll learn more about this if you keep reading),
- steak de toro - simply a steak of bull meat, served with fries.
I ordered a steak de toro, which wasn't that awesome, but I got to finish one of the girls' plates of paella, which was excellent. We all split a pitcher of sangria, and then hustled over to the Avenue Jean Jaurés to check out the brívado, a style of running of the bulls that I saw the first night I arrived in France. However, this isn't the run-as-fast-as-you-can-so-you-don't-get-gorged-in-the-butt-Spanish-running-of-the-bulls. The brívado is when some Camarguais cowboys riding on horses block the bull behind them and a bunch of young guys chase it, trying to hold onto it's tail, shoulders, and horns, respectively, to slow it down to a standstill. After watching that, we walked around again and then headed to a dancing-oriented bodèga for younger people, where we saw a ton of people from our lycée. At midnight we headed out of there to get picked up my my host mother before it got too crazy.
Sunday night I took the opportunity to go to a real bullfight with the Granier (you don't add an "s" on the end in French for a family name), a family of friends. Sorry PETA members... If I lived here all the time I don't think I would go see a corrida every year, but it was something that I had to see once. I saw three matadors - El Fundi (awesomest name ever, although I have no idea what it means), Juan José Padilla, and Rafaelillo each fight and kill three bulls. I'm not going to recount the whole process of a bullfight, as I don't want to ruin it if you go see one. But I will clear up a few falsehoods about a bullfight. First of all, it's not just one matador who fights a bull. At the beginning there are at least 6. The matador whose name you hear participates throughout the whole process and is the one who kills the taureau. Also, the capes the matadors use are not always red; they are big and pink at the beginning and red just for the final two stages. Finally, some may argue that a bullfight is a cruel waste of an animal. However, the bull, which is of a special breed raised specifically for corridas, is at least given a fighting chance before being made into gardiane.
Afterwards I had some more paella and sangria and walked around. That's all I've really got on the feria. It's a good experience but one also has to be careful about the dangers that exist, most of them after midnight in the busy streets full of drunk, aggressive people. Still, see it in your lifetime if you can. Chao
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