Rota, Spain - El Bucarito Farm

April 25, 2015

The El Bucarito farm is right outside Rota.  It is a goat cheese farm.  They also raise Iberian pigs, horses, and chickens. The pigs are eventually made into  jamón and chorizo. The coolest part of the farm is that it is a complete cycle for producing no waste.  The animal poo turns into fertilizer for the fields where the goats graze.  The whey from the cheese production is fed to the pigs and baby goats.  We started the tour with a typical Spanish breakfast of orange juice and toast with olive oil.  The toast is not the typical square sliced loaf, but instead is about 6 inches round and delicious. Next we saw the cheese making and even made our own from the first pass curds. The cheeses are hand pressed and then put in refrigerated rooms for maturing.  Next we saw the goats and I felt a connection to their milking days upon days.  The pumping room was impressive that is piped directly to the storage tank in the room adjacent to the cheese processing room. Then we saw the pigs which Owen absolutely loves and laughs whenever they make noise. The mom pigs are in a room for 20 days continuously for nursing their piglets.  It was a fun farm, good tour, and yummy cheese and  jamón.

Owen is not a fan of his hair net.

Seville, Spain - Bullfight April 25

April 25, 2015

The 2015 temporada began on 25APR for me in Sevilla.  This corrida de torros featured Juan Jose Padilla (The Pirate), Miguel Abellan and David Fandila "El Fandi" each fighting two bulls.   The torros were from Jandilla and Vegahermosa.  The first fight was the most interesting to me.  A 530 kg Vegahermosa bull showed great fight.  He gored Jose Padilla in the left medial thigh during the first act.  They must blunt the horns, as Jose Padilla finished the fight but with jeans to cover his torn pants.  For his second bull he was wrapped with medical tape and if you look at the pictures you can see a lump of gauze were the horn must have hit.  It may not have punctured, but he will be bruised.  One also wonders if he will get an aneurysm in the future as this is a tremendous amount of blunt trauma.  This same bull showed equal ferocity during the second act.  While inserting a Vara and bull knocked the Picador off his horse and the horse on its back.   In Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Dangerous Summer it was mentioned that the Picador’s horse often died from disembowelment.  Primo de Rivera’s government ordered a quilted mattress to protect the horses belly from the horns and trauma to the horses is now unheard of.  This horse survived and walked off the arena.  In fact the Picador and horse placed a second Vara in the toro’s Morillo.  Injuring the neck muscles is critical in the second act so the bulls head drops allowing a clean kill in the third act.  Jose Padilla placed his own banderilla’s as he usually does.  This is my favorite part of the fight.  The banderillo (or matador in Jose Padilla’s case) exposes themselves to a very feisty bull three times to place six banderilla’s.  During the third act, Jose Padilla had some very pretty passes with his muleta before trying to kill the bull with his estocada.  It was not a clean estocada and he attempted to finish the bull with a descaballo.  He had a hard time getting the spinal cord severed and had to repeat this a few times.  A beautiful fight ruined by a poor kill and no ears were awarded.

Miguel Abellan had some beautiful passes with the veronica and good clean kills.  He got no orejas for either bull.  Sevilla features tough judges.  In Sanlucar de Barremeda or Puerto de Santa Maria he would have got something I think.
David Fandila got 145 ears in the 2014 temporada.  He is one of the best bullfighters in the world.  He left Sevilla with one ear, the only oveja awarded in the six fights.  I enjoyed his second bull (he did not get an ear for this one) but he did an amazing backwards run while touching the bulls head in the third act.
I am excited to being the 2015 temporada.  The first fight in Puerto is 30MAY and San Lucar 10MAY.  I also want to try to make it up to Ronda this year.  The next fight in Sevilla is 10 MAY but since Sanlucar is this day, 17MAY will be my next trip to Sevilla.  It is a 1.5 hr drive to Sevilla and 14 euros in tolls but well worth it.   As Ernest Hemingway said, “Any man can face death but to be committed to bring it was close as possible while performing certain movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love it more complicated than just facing death.  It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer.”  I think I saw good six examples of most beautiful tradition in Sevilla.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

April 16-19, 2015

The Netherlands is a beautiful country almost most of it below sea level in the northern part of Europe bordering Germany and Belgium. The Dutch are most recognizable for producing Gouda cheese, tulips, and wooden shoes.  Amsterdam is most known for bicycling, narrow buildings, freedom and then, of course, legal prostitution and marijuana. My favorite part about the Netherlands is their fascination with draining land in order to be able to live below sea level.  The amount of channels, pumps and dams is extraordinary.

Gouda cheese is yellowish in color and produced in a wheel-like shape and size. The name Gouda originates from the Dutch city of Gouda where the cheese has been sold for centuries.  Cheese making in the Netherlands goes back to the earliest settlers of the area. Since the 17th century, the Netherlands is known for its cheese output. 

The tulip was brought to Amsterdam via Vienna from the Ottoman Empire in 1554. The Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius planted the seeds in the Low Countries and discovered that the bulbs thrived in those soil and water conditions. Between 1634 and 1637 the Tulip Mania reigned where a single bulb sold for more than that of a house in downtown Amsterdam.  Presently, the Netherlands is the world's main producer of commercial tulip plants, producing as many as 3 billion bulbs annually.  In 1950 the Keukenhof garden was opened as a spring park of only bulb flowers and has the world’s largest permanent display of tulips. The design of the garden is the same as the 1857 design by landscape architects Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher that used the English landscape style. 

The wooden shoes are a garden shoe to be worn with thick socks.  With the marshy landscape, the wooden shoe lasted longer than its leather counterpart. The shoe now has cultural significance with there being a special pair with intricate carvings just for weddings. In the Netherlands there are only three authentic wood carving shoe shops, or at least that is what one of these three shoe makers told us. 

Amsterdam started with a water dam being built across the Amstel River.  Hence the name Amstel Dam turns into Amsterdam. The Dutch Golden Age was during the 17th century with the Dutch East India Company that dominated world trade being the first multi-national and publicly traded company in our history. It was during this time that the city began being a magnet for migrants seeking political and religious freedom. The city of Amsterdam is on a network of onion-like ringed channels with all the structures being on either wooden or concrete piles. Since land was so expensive, the houses are incredibly narrow, but then can be 4 or 5 stories high.  The top peak of the house has hooks in order to hoist stuff up to the upper floors since the stairways were so narrow nothing could be carried up the stairs. It was in one of these houses that Anne Frank hid from the Nazis during WWII. There are more bicycles in Amsterdam than people.   Our tour guide claims that their are 50,000 bikes thrown into the canals per year.  

The land is almost all below sea level. The river on the right is at sea level.

In front of the grey car is a typical 4-wheeler in the US.  

The 4-wheeler is bigger than the car.