San Fermin Continues

I was planning on taking the bus to Pamplona Saturday morning, but the night monitors Raul and Lunia offered to give me a lift in their van. Raul told me that if the police were to pull us over, I would just have to pretend I don´t speak Spanish and he would tell the police I´m a tired, lost pilgrim he picked up. I grabbed my credential from upstairs to further prove my case if needed. It´s a good thing we made it to Pamplona without having to lie to the cops. I´m a horrible liar, which is probably a good thing.


The first thing I did was head to the photo shop to print my photos from the trip to Switzerland, Germany, and Portugal. I really wanted to get those into the alblum before I get back to Gainesville, where I know I would take a long time to get it done, if I ever do it. A lady helped me who spoke English perhaps equal to or a little bit below my Spanish. Some of her assistance saved me a couple euros, but at other times she just confused me more. It was strange how the Pamplonians all of a sudden began to either speak English or assume that I could not speak or understand Spanish. Then I went to my favorite pastry shop, Beatriz. I had been in there enough times that they knew I could understand them, though they´re faces told me they probably had to think for a couple seconds before they understood what I said. The garrotes and muffins were perfect that morning.


I headed for the bus station to see about leaving my backpack in the left luggage room. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw at the bottom of stairs leading down to the underground station. I thought the new station was the most beautiful facility I had ever seen when I first walked in there the weekend it opened, but now it looked as dumpy as any inner city public transportation hub. Everywhere I looked people were sitting or sleeping on the floor. Abandoned beer bottles stood against the walls. It was louder and smelled worse than ever before. This was the new bus station´s first fiesta de San Fermin. Let´s hope it can be restored somewhat close to its pre-tourist invasion condition. When I went up to meet Anele and Alexia outside, I saw that the grass in the open area between the bus station and the ciudadela had also had a rough couple of days. It had changed from green to yellow because the grass had either died or been worn away.

From there I took them to the Plaza del Castillo, which of course was filled with people by now. We wound our way through the plaza and the streets to the ayuntamiento, or city hall. It is easily one of the prettiest buildings in Pamplona, but green banners draped from balconies made the building even more beautiful than usual. I still had not bought a pañuelo, or handerkerchief, traditionally red. I bought one from San Fermin´s official store called kukuxumusu because I thought that the ones with the shiny Pamplona coat of arms embroidered on them looked tacky. I really like the cartoony style of the kukuxumusu apparel. The t-shirts are too expensive, starting at fifteen euros, but the handkerchief was only 4.75€.


All the restaurants were pretty crowded so I took them down to the kebab restaurant near my apartment, where I had gathered with my American friends many times. In spite of the mayhem in the old town, it was for the most part business as usual in the residential area to the south. The biggest difference was that the main drag, Sancho el Fuerte, had been changed from a four lane road to a two lane road with two lanes for parking in the middle.

By mid-afternoon Pamplona was covered by clouds and the sky was sprinkling the already damp streets. As we strolled from the park to Calle Mayor we found two guys carrying a canvas sign over their heads. They invited us to join them in their makeshift shelter to stay dry. I asked them where they got it from and one of them said they tore off of a wall and had been carrying it around all day. They were from Atlanta. Alexia said she had no idea they were speaking until we ducked under the canvas with them. I understood them just fine because, as I told Alexia, I speak guy. They told us they had ran with the bulls that morning.

Around 2 am, we started to look for a place to sleep. Nobody had reserved a hostel. We were all expecting to sleep outside. Anele and Alexia did not even have backpacks. Anele wanted to sleep in one of those rooms adjacent to the banks where they keep the ATMs. When I went into one booth in the old town to withdraw money, I noticed immediately that the floor was wet. But the repungant smell did not hit me until Alexia broke the bad news- somebody had urinated in there. I thought that even if we could find one that´s clean and and not crowded, the police would kick us out. Nevertheless, I decided we should look for a place on Carlos III, the pedestrianized shopping street branching off the Plaza del Castillo.

We found a large, clean Caja Navarra ATM room and settled down. Alexia rested her head against the ATM by the window. Anele tried to use cardboard as a sleeping pad. I did the same with newspaper, but all it did was protect me just a little from the cold floor. I switched off between wearing my hooded jacket and using it as a pillow. Eventually I tried using my shoes as a pillow. That was the most effective method, giving me half an hour of sleep. Another guy came in a few minutes after us and settled down. I had long since figured out that with so many crazy drunk people wreaking havoc in the old town, Pamplona´s police department had far bigger fish to fry than removing three otherwise law-abiding Americans from an ATM booth. Another guy came in a few minutes later and settled down in a different part of the room.

Everyone who walked by seemed determined to keep us awake. One guy came up, stood right over me, and started singing loudly as if he also wanted to wake up the residents above. Another group came in yelling through a megaphone. Countless people knocked or banged on the glass trying to get our attention as if we were caged lions in a zoo. By five o'clock in the morning Anele and I were so tired that we were no longer planning on running with the bulls, but we still wanted to see them run from a safe spot behind a fence.


We started walking toward the old town at about a quarter to seven. There were already so many people outside, donning their white shirts and red scarves as always, that it felt it like the middle of a typical Pamplona day. We saw four people still sleeping in another ATM room about half the size of ours. By the time we reached the round-a-bout about six hundred meters from the old town, I could tell there was no way we would be able to get a spot along the fence judging from the number of people already walking on Carlos III.

When we finally reached the fence separating the runners and the bulls in the city hall´s plaza from everyone else, it was about seven o´clock. The top of the fence in the front was already lined with people and a crowd had already gathered behind the rear fence. A couple policemen were arresting a young, resistant drunk man in the space in between. Anele was determined to see something so we followed her under the two fences and into the plaza. It was clear by now that we would not be able to see anything unless we were on the other side of the fence- in other words, unless we ran with the bulls.

We found a few guys talking in English- a tall, almost bald guy in his thirties from California, another thirty-something man from Pittsburgh, and a father and son from Michigan. The guy from California convinced me to stay with little piece of advice- "F&%$ the bulls, watch the people! There are about fifteen hundred of you and maybe five will get hurt. If you get hurt, buy a lottery ticket." He explained the procedure. At about twenty to eight, they push everyone into the plaza. Then at a quarter to eight, they let us loose so we can go to the section where we want to run. He told us to avoid the hard right turn from the plaza onto Estafeta because that is where most of the brutal footage of bulls slamming people against the wall is taken. The ground is slippery because they spray the streets in the morning and the bulls have (litterally) a ton of momentum as they slide around the corner. Also, don´t stop and don´t look back. If you fall, cover up and hope for the best.

I wanted to at least run with the bulls for a little while, not just run ten meters into the bull ring. Alexia went to the other side of the fence after agreeing to meet Anele and I in front of the toilets near the bullring. I walked to the end of Estafeta, about 150 meters from the bullring. Then I waited. Of course everyone was looking toward Estafeta, from where the bulls would come. People started running so I started running. But a couple seconds later I, along with most everyone else, stopped after we realized that nothing was coming. This happened three or four times. Then everybody started running so I knew it was for real. By now I was past Estafeta in the middle the road separating it from the bullring. I ran as fast as I could, never looking back. I assumed that the bulls were far behind me so I thought there was no need to look back anyway. Following some advice from the Atlanta boys, I tried to stay close to the edge but not right up against it.

About twenty meters from the door leading into the bullring, the atmosphere was total madness. Everyone was running at full speed but at the same time stopping to look back at the bulls. The crowd forced me closer to the edge than I wanted to be. I saw a brown and white bull (which I later found out was one of the less dangerous castrated ones) right next to me, so close I could have reached out and touched him. But that was the last thing I wanted to do. I tried to suppress my fear and only stare straight ahead. I hit the ground hard a second later. I had collided with one of those people or one of those people who had ran into one of those people who stopped and looked behind. The guy I met in the plaza had encouraged us to use our elbows to knock people over, but that did not occurr to me at the moment. Even if I managed to knock anyone down, I could still trip over him or he could cause somebody else to trip. The footsteps of the people about to fall on top of me made so much noise I thought I was about to be trampled by bulls. One guy tripped and fell on me and another one on top him and so on. I thought that if the bulls were coming, at least they were more likely to be trampled because I would be protected near the bottom of the pile-up. A guy pulled me out of the way a couple seconds later. Iwas quite thankful for that. My white pants were torn at the knee on both sides. The left side was stained with blood from the scrape on my knee about the size of a quarter. I was hoping to keep those pants. Oh well. Still a little shaken, I looked for a way out of there. I couldn´t find one. After about a minute, I remembered that I could jump back in and run into the bullring. Unfortunately, the door shut as soon as I started running toward it. Disappointed and upset with the people who had to stop and look back, I walked toward out meeting spot.

A couple hours later, we went to Foto Auma in the Plaza del Castillo to look for ourselves in the photos posted outside. I immediately found myself in three of them. Until I saw the pictures, I had no idea that only was there a castrated bull to my left, there were three more right behind me and a real bull just behind them. I bought one of the pictures, which I photographed wth my camera. It now serves as my facebook profile picture. I later bought three large copies for my parents and grandparents.

San Fermin Begins

Whenever I told anyone last fall that I had been in Pamplona once before, they would ask me, "For San Fermin?" Everyone talked about it as if it is the best thing ever. Well, finally, I got to see what the fuss was all about. Actually, my reasons for for going back to Pamplona were two-fold and some would say contradictory. I also wanted to go to church because the CNAI camp is a spiritual dead zone. I love my coworkers, but at the same time it is very hard to stay strong in my faith everybody else is either an atheist or not practicing. I figured while I was in Pamplona, I might as well join the party. Responsibly of course.

In spite of the mayhem starting in the town centre, it was business as usual at Parroquia Cristiana Evangelica. I was very glad to see everyone again. It was far less crowded than most weeks. A lot of people had probably already fled Pamplona. After the service I met a guy named Javier who had only started attending the church a couple months ago. He asked me if I was in town for San Fermin. That was half true, but I said no. He lived in England for eight months so he knew some English and was very excited that he could practice with me. He treated me at the kebab restaurant, where even he had trouble communicating with one of the new guys there. It made feel better to know that my past problems with the new people there were not caused by my bad Spanish.

I went to Pamplona on a whim without any place to sleep that night. I wasn´t sure if I would even try to sleep. I brought my sleeping bag in case anything presented itself. After eating dinner with the youth, I told them I could walk to the town centre to look for some friends, but they insisted on driving me home. I had Ruben drive me to my old apartment on Calle Iturrama. I did not tell him that I no longer lived there. I didn´t feel too comfortable not telling my friends the whole truth but I wanted to avoid explaining my plans (or lack thereof) for the night. In hindsight, if they cared enough about me to prevent me from walking in the chilly weather, maybe one of them would have given me shelter on such short notice.

I walked from my apartment to the Plaza del Castillo tracing the same route we always took from Soleil or Brittany´s piso. As I entered the Plaza del Catillo, I saw that the party had already started. A small crowd on the right side near Calle Estafeta was drinking, singing and dancing. No surprise there. I walked over to Calle San Nicolas, where I found some Erasmus students the week before. I found plenty of people, but nobody I knew. After trying most every bar we regularly patronized over the past six months, I decided to just walked around the Plaza del Castillo. After all, watching the singing and dancing in the Plaza seemed far more entertaining than watching or even doing the standing and drinking in any other part of the Casco Antiguo.

Luckily I found some people I knew- Paige, another girl whose name escapes me because I never had any classes with her, and her little sister. Then three Italians suddenly appeared, Giorgio, Lorenzo, and Emilio. After dancing with the drunk people for a little while, the Americans and Italians went home and I thought about what to do next.

I had never slept in a public park of any kind before so I was pretty nervous about it. With my luck, I was afraid the police would find me and throw me in jail. I walked to the wall on the north side of the old town to check out the park sleeping situation. There was one large tent set up under a tree. I thought sleeping near other people would be safer because the police did not have enough room for all of us in their cars or even their stations. But then again, being near many people would increase the risk of being mugged. Two of my coworkers, Charlie and Yanna, just happened to find me near the bridge that runs high over the road and connects the old town with the park on the other side. Charlie assured me that in Spain they don´t care if you sleep outside.

This sliver of the park is always one of the calmest areas of Pamplona. It is bordered on the backside by bushes and the wall side by a little sidewalk, in front of which stands a fence that protects from the fifty foot drop below. From the fence you can see the entire north side of Pamplona and mountains on all sides of it. In between is a grassy area dotted with benches and shltered by the branches of the trees above. The beginning of San Fermin had not changed it at all. There were no empty beer bottles lying around. Many of the benches in the area were still dotted with small puddles, but I found one in the middle of the grass that had escaped the rain. I spread my sleeping bag on the bench, using it as a blanket and my backpack as a pillow. I did not take off my shoes because I was afraid of losing them while I slept. I also feared somebody would try to scare the living daylights out of me as a joke. The night was cold; I did not bring a jecket because it was so hot during the day that I thought I would not need it. A few times I could hear people walking on the sidewalk but fortunately nobody even came near me much less touched me all night. I went to bed around 2:30, woke up around 3:30 and then again at 6:30. I ate my breakfast of a bruised apple and some small donuts that had been smashed by various objects in my bag´s outer pocket.

I had nothing to do until at least 9:30, when I was supposed to call my friend Sabi, so I ordered a cup of cafe con leche from a coffee shop located kitty corner from the department store El Corte Ingles. I stayed at my seat by the window for at least two hours after I had finished my coffee. I had bought a copy of Hermingway´s The Sun Also Rises the night before so I continued reading it. It was the novel that made San Fermin famous in the first place. The first part is set in Paris, but the second part is set in the very neighborhood where I was sitting.

I finally called Sabi at 9:30. He told me to meet him in the Plaza del Castillo at ten to ten. I actually found him at ten past ten. Meanwhile, people wearing read scarves had started to fill the Plaza del Castillo. I followed Sabi and another boy I recognized but whose name I could not remember through the narrow streets of the old town. We stopped at an old wooden door with no numbers or markings of any kind. Sabi opened the door with a key and led us in. It was the kind of place that defines the expression "hole in the wall". The room was narrow, probably not more than seven feet across. The decorations on the wall included pro-Basque propaganda as well as posters of Disney movies like The Fox and the Hound. Sabi´s friends were setting up a table in the middle of the room. A couple others were smoking. Sabi introduced me to all of them. They all shook hands with me and asked me where I was from. In the back room we watched coverage of the follow-up to the official start of San Fermin on TV. The mayor of Pamplona was shown a couple times. I was the only one in the room not yelling and swearing at the screen whenever her face appeared. I asked Sabi if she´s bad and he told me she´s very bad, to the right.

Then we sat down to eat or amozar as Sabi put it. The food was very good, though a little cold. When I asked for a fork they laughed and told me that Basques use bread instead of cutlery when they eat. I don´t think they were kidding. Nevertheless one of them gave me a plastic fork which I snapped when I tried to cut the meat with it. Somebody accidentally spilled a bucket of food on the floor, which everyone ridiculed by chanting, "Español! Español!"

After lunch, we walked outside for the opening. We swerved in and out of the crowds until we got as far up as we could without having to literally push and squeeze our way through, though many others chose to do that. Sabi introduced me to his mother, who was standing near us wearing her pañuelo, a handkerchief, traditionally red for San Fermin. Many people were drinking, but not everyone. It was mostly adults because it would be near impossible to keep track of a kid in a crowd like that, but they were not all there to get drunk. Everyone held both ends of their handkerchiefs in the air, as a triangle pointed down, until the rocket was fired off. Then the crowd went wild, singing and spraying wine all over the place. Before long, I had more alcohol on the outside of me than on the inside.

Then we went to a bar that resembled a fast food joint. They served patatas bravas and bocadillos, but my new Basque friends only wanted to drink. I watched more footage of San Fermin on the TV. We sang and danced to some traditional San Fermin songs which I told myself I have to learn before I come to this party again. After we left that bar we went to this fountain that I had heard about before. Some daredevils like to jump off of it and hope the crowd catches them. And there was quite a crowd of mostly boys in their twenties. I soon found out why. One girl lifted her shirt to reveal a bikini top. I was assumong that was as far as she would go when I suddenly had to avert my eyes as she exposed her bare chest to the crowd before she leaped towards them. It turned out that every girl was expected to flash before she jumped. The boys around were chanting, trying to pressure every blonde girl in the plaza to flash, even the ones who were not jumping off the fountain. I don´t think the eating, singing, dancing, and drinking in moderation is necessarily bad. San Fermin is as much a tradition as the American 4th of July, but this flashing from the fountain is definitely something I could have done without.

Afterwards we went into a few bars. Or rather, they went in and I walked in only to walk out a minute later. When the bars are underground, the smoke gets trapped inside so it´s hard for me to breathe. On top of that they´re hot because so many people are crammed into a small space and smelly because most of those people are dripping with sweat. This was probably the second worst part of the afternoon. Finally, we went to a bar that had both the front and the back doors open and was not built underground so the smoke was not as bad. It had a poster on the low ceiling with a hundred or so postage stamp sized mugshots of Basque political prisoners.