October 10th, 2002 | The lowdown by Jeffrey Goodkind

The Tomatina.

From the same country that brings you such demonstrations of machissmo as the Running of the Bulls, I now present the Tomatina, where in place of bulls you have hundreds of shirtless young men and women (shirtless, not bare) throwing around blood red tomatoes and flinging wet t-shirts.

Wait, what? T-shirts? That´s the question I was asking myself as I pushed deeper into the crowd. What was going on? Every year, at noontime August 28th, Buñol celebrates its annual and plentiful tomato harvest by dumping three truckloads of the stuff into the city center, painting its cobblestones red.

All that goes in is destroyed, whether it be ripped or drenched. I had abackpack and a camera bag with me that day, and it was definitely a good move to ask a native if I could store my stuff in their house for a few hours. Very graciously, one household offered me and my friends some space, saving our gear and the 2 Euro (2 dollar) bag check by the Buñol train station.

Again, all that goes in is destroyed. It starts with the mind. Tomatina is a great place to get drunk. There is a great sense of community in passing around cans of beer and watered-down rum, and definitely the perfect place to release drunken aggressions. We were bulls, running and pushing around aimlessly, following the herd, and yet playing every man for himself. The natives must have had a kick teasing us from their apartment balconies, high above the streets, dropping buckets of water on us.

The aggressions went beyond just the tomatoes; tomatoes were just the beginning. There grew a fascination with ripping off clueless participant´s t-shirts. Hint: Tomatina is a bad place for that nice shirt mom gave you for Christmas. Packs of shirtless men would find the shirted ones, surround their prey, and bellow ?camiseta, camiseta.? With little chance to fight back these shirtless beasts, like skinning their kill, the shirt came off. My wife-beater was gone within 10 minutes of hanging about the ?mosh pit,? as my friends called it.

All shirtless, the mosh pit is the lowest part of the streets, where my feet stood in literally four inches of tomato juice and pulp. Soaked head to toe in this tomato blood, and without anymore tomatoes to puncture and throw, we returned to camisetas, all of the ripped t-shirts that lay drowning under our feet. Heavy with juice, t shirts hurt quite a bit. Again, Tomatina is a great place to be drunk. Senses are best numbed at this point.

Eventually, with some hard work and some hard dunking in the river of tomatoes, I worked my way out of the pit, slipping past wet hairy backed men and pushing along the other defeated ahead of me. The next mission was to wash off the juice, jumping in the local river, stripping off the stained clothes and rubbing off those sticky seeds. With a friend´s help, I actually found a good fountain in a nearby park to take care of this business.

After all was over, we had some time on the 8 hour trip back to Granada to reflect. Looking back at the Tomatina, I´ll take it for the unique experience it was. It´s a uniquely Spanish thing to do, as this is a culture that celebrates death, that sees life cyclically as Ernest Hemingway portrayed in The Sun Also Rises.

A few thousand of us massacred Buñol's tomatoes that August 28th. It was no coincidence, then, that my friends and I craved pizza afterwards. When I ordered pizza at a Valencia pizzeria just after the festival, I found it a cruel joke that my Marinara pizza came without sauce. Ha ? you probably already got your share, that dry crust seemed to tell me.