Spain, Day Seven--Ronda

Okay. We didn't love our apartment in Ronda proper. Yes, it was nice to get away from the family for a hot second, but we were staying in the city in a nondescript apartment with no attached parking lot. It was meh.

But we got up early to meet Jesus at the bullfighter statue for a three-hour tour of Ronda.

Let me just say this: looking back on the entire trip, this tour ended up being one of my favorite moments.

Ronda is a spectacular city. Turns out, it's one of the smaller ones in Andalucía, but one of the most visited. And thankfully Jesus had encouraged us to start the tour early because once the tour busses started to arrive, it was almost impossible to walk down the street.

We started with the gorge, and it's one of those moments where it doesn't matter how I try to capture a photo of it, it just doesn't do it justice.

Then we headed to the bull-fighting ring of Ronda. It is only in operation one week a year (during the festival), but this let us explore the ring to our heart's content. And with Jesus being a huge fan of the matadors, he was able to answer all of our questions about the "sport": the mechanics of choosing which bulls they will fight (it's done by lottery, and the matadors are always told that they picked the smallest bulls), the head space of the matadors (they have a chapel where they can pray beforehand), the cowardice of those who ride horses to fight the bulls, the fact that bulls aren't raised around humans (so they don't associate human legs with friendliness and food). Seriously, all of it.

We then toured the rest of the city. We passed musicians, we learned about churches and trees, and we took in more gorgeous views. The end of the tour was walking back UP what we had walked down, and there were some Spanish teenagers who wanted to practice their English with us, but we survived it all and sat down to a delicious lunch afterwards.

I think our lunch might have been Trevor's favorite of the trip so far, and the gelato was refreshing as always!

This drink looks like water, but it was some kind of voodoo magic apple drink that certainly came from the apple in the Garden of Eden because it was one of the most delicious things I've ever had to drink!

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