¡Vale!

This is my new favourite Spanish word. (The old one was "chica.") I´m not quite sure exactly what it means, but it´s something along the lines of, "that´s alright, that´s cool, no problem," but in the arena of flamenco dancing (and guitar playing, singing, clapping, and foot-stomping) is also used very frequently in the way I had assumed "ole" would be.

I´m in Seville, waiting for replacement credit and debit cards, and have spent my five days here wandering the streets and soaking up all the flamenco I can get my hands on. I haven´t paid to see any of the spectacle shows marketed for tourists, but I´ve seen several laid back, casual affairs in tiny bars, where the audience is just as likely to participate in the flamenco jam as the performers. The dancing, though, is incredible. There´s this imposing power and assertive aggression to the way the woman stomp their feet and assuredly raise and move their arms. It´s a lot more aggressive and serious than I thought it would be, and that makes me like it even more.

Also, I visited the bullring, on a guided tour, and am very sad that I´m not here in April with my battered copy of The Sun Also Rises in hand. As gruesome as the details of a corrida are, I found myself curiously compelled regardless. Each bullfight lasts two hours. There are three matadors and six bulls, and each matador has to kill two. It only takes 20 minutes to kill a bull, and the bulls are shipped to the ring from various bull farms in Andalucia only 24 hours before the fight.

Matadors die too, and there was a very famous matador in the mid-twentieth century who started fighting when he was 9, and died in the ring at 20. The bullring in Seville had a tiny museum in which a matador outfit he wore at 14 was hanging in a glass case. Wild.