Arrival & LA TOMATINA FESTIVAL!

I have officially arrived! On Monday August 30th, I boarded the plane from Philadelphia to Madrid at 6:30pm. An 8 hour plane ride later plus a 6 hour time advancement, it was now Tuesday August 31st at 8:30am. Thanks to the lovely tour group of high school Spaniards in front of me this now means that I had absolutely zero sleep for the day. YAY. I then boarded my plane to Barcelona and arrived to look for my friends who were going to La Tomatina with me. I immediately started to feel the language difference and knew that this was going to be fun. I waited for my roommate Molly by the luggage, found her and a nice man who shared his Wifi hot spot and we met up with the rest of our group. A 4 hour bus ride later left us in Valencia to meet up with our La Tomatina Package. After a fun night out on the town, we went to bed. Lets get to the good stuff.

6am wake up call, breakfast, and a scramble to the hour bus-ride to Bunol. Here we would be meeting the 60,000 other people at the  La Tomatina festival, the largest food fight in the world all with TOMATOES. Lets just say that our day was started off right when our bus consisted of these guys from the UK.

We walked to the center of town after finding our Sangria, and met these Spaniards who are clearly the coolest people in Spain. My roommate Molly is in the middle, love her!

Then the madness began. We were luckily in the best spot and got to see all of the action. La Tomatina is famous for the Ham Pole. This is a large pole that is completely greased up with a ham on the top. Everyone fights to the top of the pole and the first person to climb up to the top of the pole and retrieve the ham is pretty much the star of the day and that is when the tomato fight begins. This took about two hours and of course an American got the ham down- making me proud.

This sparked the biggest water fight i've ever taken part in. Lukily we were right next to the cage of extremely powerful firemen water hoses with a lot of drunk people handling them- aka hard blows of water to the face. After much crowd surfing, five stars to the stomach and tossing around, the trucks of tomatoes started pouring in.

Then, for the next hour my life consisted of tomatoes to the face, tomatoes smashed into the face/mouth, mosh pits, my shirt getting completely ripped off by 5 spaniards, firehoses to the face and probably the best day of my life with some new amazing friends.

And then we just wanted to chill.

Absolutely the BEST start to Spain- I don't know how anything is gonna top it but I bet Barcelona is the place to do it.