Scholarship Entry

La Tomatina, the largest tomato fight in the world, now that’s the kind of thing you hear about and just know you have to experience. It’s also the kind of thing where you then find yourself standing half blinded with acidic tomato juice, barefoot and ankle deep in tomato pulp having lost both your shoes, crushed by hundreds of other sweaty, tomato covered people wondering “how did I get here again? WHY am I here??!”

My friends and I stood in the crowd of thousands on the one long, thin street of the little town of Bunol, where this annual tomato madness takes place. We were dressed in our bathing suits, a mish-mash of clothes we weren’t too attached to and swimming goggles - it was a stylish affair I assure you.

We had just spent two cold, wakeful nights sleeping in a field at the edge of town, a field we had unwittingly shared with a multitude of minute, white snails, and since I imagine hair looks an awful lot like blades of grass to a snail in the dark, we woke up each morning sporting living hair accessories and slimy silver highlights, traces of which was still in our bedraggled hair.

Huge trucks full of tomatoes started squeezing down the street which you would have sworn was at capacity, though with my nose pressed into a wall and my head in a stranger’s armpit I was inclined to argue the point with them. Water cannons sounded and the madness commenced!

Have you ever had a semi-ripe tomato squished into your ear? Allow me to save you doing the research. It sounds like what you hear when your head is underwater and feels like the larger relations of those field snails are roaming around in all your ear cavities. Continuous cries of “Camiseta! Camiseta!” rang out though the mayhem, a sign that someone was about to have their shirt ripped off them in tattered shreds. Trying to run the other way in a crowd like that means throwing yourself up against the wall of people like flopping fish in a barrel.

A friend and I climbed part way up a drainpipe for a better vantage point, but I started to slide down a side street, a waterfall of people and tomato pulp, my friend held onto the drainpipe with one hand and my hand with the other, both of us yelling, “Don’t let go!!” as our slime covered fingers slipped from one another and I slid backwards down the street. I hiked back up and it was back into the fray, but then, with the boom of the water cannons again, it was suddenly over. My souvenir? I’d be finding tomato seeds in my ears for days!