Corre de los Toros

Wouldn't this be a Where's Waldo shot paradise?

This weekend was a lot more different than I expected.  I went to Pamplona with 2 friends, another Au Pair who is from France and a guy I know from church. This is where the infamous running of the bulls takes place. We arrived on Saturday afternoon at about 3 P.M. to find the city completely trashed. Literally. Drunken people passed out and empty Sangria bottles scattered everywhere. Sangria is a popular alcoholic drink in Spain; it is made of wine and is supposed to look like blood (Sangre in Spanish= blood, hence Sangria). We walked around for a couple of hours and really just saw how many people were there and how drunk everyone was. The official name of the Festival for a Saint San Fermin and everyone wears white and red to be symbolic of him. White because he was a saint and red because he was a martyr. The festival of the running of the bulls really just ended up being meshed with the festival for San Fermin and the running of the bulls. This whole festival was made popular by the book The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway- I didn’t know that until I went. I guess I should read it now.

Did you know more people have died during running of the bulls from alcohol poisoning than being injured by a bull? It doesn’t surprise me. The whole festival is literally a week long of straight partying. Everywhere you go people are spilling sangria all over and everyone’s clothes are stained by it. It is really apparent because people are wearing so much white. To make it ever more of a mess there are around 1 million people or more in Pamplona during the festival. The normal occupancy of the city is 200,000. This means no hotels have rooms and everyone sleeps in parks. It was extremely loud and people are just sprawled everywhere. It kind of reminded me of Spring Fling at Penn (huge 3-4 day music festival/play land) but on steroids.

Three guys fell asleep on the group right outside where we were going to watch the running

We went to a concert in the middle of the night that was being held near the center of the city. They only did cover songs of popular American songs. For some reasons Spaniards are obsessed with the tune “7 Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Every soccer game all of the fans would start chanting the tune to it, almost like it is a fight song or something. They played that song at this concert at least 3 times. They also played a lot of other top hits. Most of the songs resulted in a mosh pit-> which means Sangria is everywhere. I just barely washed all of it out of my hair. It was Gross.

The concert at 4 in the morning

Finally, the run:

The run officially starts at 8 A.M. every morning of the festival, but people secure good spots to watch it started at like 3 in the mornings. We got there are 6 and sadly had really bad spots to see. We still saw it, it just wasn’t prime. I got a little bit of it recorded.

This is the best picture I could get and the only one with an actual bull!

Sad news: Did you know at the end of every day of the running of the bulls they have a bullfight? Did you know the bullfight means public massacre of the bulls that ran? I had no idea that this actually happened. I thought it was something like a rodeo. Sadly, it is not. I also found out that two days before the festival there was a “Running of the nudes” hosted by Peta (animal cruelty activist group). Apparently it is illegal to streak in Basque country of Spain so everyone just wears underwear and runs the same course that the running of the bulls uses. We missed the nudes and the bull fight- both of which I wasn’t super keen on seeing.

After watching it I realized that the course really isn’t that difficult at all. Most of the runners are doing a light jog; the only people in trouble are those in the back. It actually seemed kind of casual, especially at the end near the bull ring (where they are herded to). There are only been 19 deaths in the past and most of them were from drunks. My host mom however told me that there is a stereotype that all the Australian tourists are really dumb and are the only people who get hurt by bulls. On Saturday morning one of the injured was Australian. There was also an old Spaniard (from Pamplona) and a little Japanese boy. I don’t think stereotypes hold up to well.

Now that it is over, I wish I had run it. I guess it is better to be safe than sorry. After I got back from Pamplona I got an email from my mom saying that she read the newspaper and didn’t see any American girls injured from Sunday morning- She thought I ran it! Just because she thought I would have run it makes me feel like a wimp. My mom, who knows me better than I know myself, expected me to be adventurous and run it. I should have just run it. I guess it can be something I will do if I ever have a midlife crisis. It just wasn’t important enough for a quarter life crisis :P.

In conclusion, it was a really fun weekend. I don’t really want to experience it again though. Super drunken fiestas aren’t one of my favorite things.

Stay tuned: Next weekend is Scotland!!