Ronda

The bridge in Ronda

On our first group excursion, we went to a town called Ronda in Spain, which was a two hour bus-ride from Cadiz.  Our madres packed us little picnic lunches—mine consisted of 2 bocadillos, which are huge baguette sandwiches, 2 apples, 2 bananas and a huge bottle of water.  It’s pretty funny comparing our lunches here to those at home. Lunch here is the biggest meal of the day, so they don’t mess around with sack lunches.  One guy’s madre always packs him like an entire package of jam, a loaf of bread, a package of cheese, and ridiculous amounts of fruit to “make the other kids jealous.”  But anyways, Ronda just so happened to be having a bull fight the day we went, so there was a huge festival going on with drinking and eating going on everywhere in the streets. 

Decorations for the street fiesta

A little group of us went to a museum where they had stuff from the Spanish Inquisition and other times where they used torture as a means of punishment.  They had all sorts of sick stuff, like a machine that kills you by stretching your body out as far as it’ll go, and a guillotine and all that.  It was actually pretty interesting- sick, but interesting.  After we did some walking around and taking pictures and stuff, we went and ate our sack lunches in a cool park right by the bull ring and watched all of the ladies walking around in their traditional Spanish dresses and the men in their Spanish suits. 

We wanted to go to the bull fight, but each ticket was almost $200.00, so we decided not to… obviously.  They are starting to make bull-fighting illegal here, so it might have been my only opportunity to ever see it, but oh well.  That’s a lot of money to a college kid!  So, we ended up walking around and drinking tinto de verano, which is tinto (wine) and juice or pop—absolutely delicious—and just enjoyed the fiesta that was going on.  It definitely was a great experience in a beautiful little town, and I’m very happy we happened to be there on that day. 

Ronda!