You Might Not Want To Look At These Pictures

So on our second day in Spain, a Sunday as it turns out, they had bull fights in Madrid. Guess they have them every Sunday. We saw the stadium when we were coming in from the airport and had to check it out. It's an impressive structure, built in 1929.

It wasn't an overflow crowd. About what you'd find at a Pittsburgh Pirates game. They kill six bulls. Three matadors are featured and each gets to down two.

It's a rigged game as you can well imagine. I put my pictures on Picasa so you can view them all on this link. It's a brutal deal, at times disgusting and disheartening. If you have a queasy stomach for this sort of thing you can skip the pictures and just take my word for it.

And yet there is a undeniable poetry to the thing. You can see why guys like Hemingway wrote about it in "Death in the Afternoon." You can also get a sense of how 168 Spanish Conquistadors under Pizarro were able to subdue an estimated 200,000 Inca warriors in the 16th Century.

On the other hand sometimes the bull gets some payback.

On this day the bulls were winless with one tie, 0-6-1. The first bull of the day was allowed to live because one of the guys on horseback committed a foul of some kind. It was all in Spanish, so what did I know? I heard later that sometimes the crowd will call for a bull to be spared. Unfortunately it also turns out these bulls rarely live long afterwards. They generally end up dying of their wounds before being returned to the farms. So it's a bad deal for them all the way around.

So from Madrid we're moving south. Toledo, Talavera and Badajoz awaits!