So first of all, so sorry for the long time between my last post and now. Time here has been a little hectic and for awhile my internet connection didn't exist so uploading photos was pretty much impossible. However now I am back and have a few posts I want to write before I leave Spain for good. On the 7th of July a big group of friends and I went to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. It was one of the craziest trips ever. We left Saturday at 2 in the afternoon, took a bus up to Pamplona and arrived there at 8. We then had until 8 in the morning to hang out in the city (we didn't plan on sleeping so we didn't rent a hotel room-plus they are unbelieveably expensive) and little did we know what the night had in store for us in Pamplona....
We went kinda stir crazy on the bus ride up north, but we were elated to finally arrive in Pamplona. This is Francisco, Dillon, Steve and Katie on the bus dressed in the San Firmin white. We heard that if you don't wear all white in san firmin people dump wine on you. It turns out that is half way true. There are people with huge tubs of wine that will dump it on you, but normally they don't just do it randomly.
Our other friends took a different bus up earlier in the day, but fortunately we met up with them at a bar. Here are Katie and Nik showing off their big muscles.
We hung out on the terrace of a bar for awhile while our other friends dropped off their bags at Cameron's flat. Here are Tamurlaine, Nik, Katie, and Trey screaming to see the bulls already. Too bad this was only at 10 at night and we still had a good 10 hours before we saw the bulls.
Here are Amber and Nik at the bar. It was Amber's 21st and I guarantee you that she will never forget turning 21 at the running of the bulls!
Crazy story 1:Here is the birthday girl again, but note a difference in this picture-check out her pants. That is right Amber peed her pants when she was waiting in the line to go to the bathroom. She said she was 3 people away from the stall when she just couldnt hold it anymore she she let it go. She came out of the bathroom laughing her butt off and we thought it was pretty funny too. Happy Birthday girl!
Crazy story 2: we were at the bar when we heard these great loud thud-like noises. After about two minutes later we realized that they had to be fireworks and we took down the street running. Now keep in mind that we were in Pamplona on July 7 and just 3 days earlier we had tried celebrating the 4th of July in madrid, but it didn't work very well. So this was our second chance to celebrate and we had freaking amazing fireworks. It was fantastic and couldn't have come at a better time!
We found this huge lit up plaza that was packed with people. They were setting up for a concert so we hung out there for awhile.
Here are the boys and Kelli. Both Kelli and Cameron bought those butt ugly cow spotted cowboy hats and were so proud of them all night.
Crazy story 3 (the craziest in my opinion): this is Cameron Kelli dancing in Cameron and her brother Trey's flat. They were renting it for the weekend from a woman and it is just an extra room in this womans house. At around 2am some of us were beat so Cameron and Trey said we could go back to their flat and crash on the floor. It took awhile, but we finally found it and tried to get some sleep. But the rest of the group was out and was trying to find the flat too. So after another hour there were about 9 of us sleeping on the floor and Cameron and Trey sleeping in their beds. Two of the people in our group didnt want to sleep so they stayed outside of the room in the hallway. The woman of the house heard them talking, walked out into the hallway and flipped when she saw strangers there. She then opened the door and had a coronary seeing 9 of us asleep on the floor. She told us we had 6 minutes (yes that is a directly quoted figure) to get out of the house before she called the cops on us. This included Cameron and Trey packing up all of their stuff and getting out of their immediately. Well needless to say, the threat of having the cops come scared the crap out of us and most of the group fled withing 30 seconds. The woman calmed down a bit more, but still definietly kicked us all out. So at 4am after being kicked out of a hotel room and being threatened to have the cops called on us we went here...
This was the cleanest park that we could find. Yeah, during San Firmin Pamplona is a DIRTY city. Keep in mind this is just what it looks like, can you imagine the smell? It was pretty darn bad.
Here is our sad mottly crew-homeless. We also forgot that we were going up north were it is a whole lot colder than in Madrid. So we were freezing out butts off all night. Fortunately to pass the time we ran into crazy story 4: We met this guy who was dutch and knew a tiny tiny bit of spanish, no english, and dutch. He decided to become our new best friend and we tried to talk for about an hour using hand gestures and his broken spanish. It was obvious that communication with this man wasnt really working so we just started making up things about him until we put in more effort to understand him better. At one point in time we decided that he must be in the mafia, but when we mentioned that he freaked and said he wasn't ever in the mafia, suspicious behavior if you ask me....
Around 6am we left to find a place to watch the running of the bulls. The streets where the bulls run are narrow and it is very difficult to see them. After a half hour though, we found a pretty good spot and settled there for the next hour and a half. Here are Kelli and I trying to look alive and awake.
Crazy story 5 (another involving the cops, there is kinda a theme here...):earlier in the night Nik had broken off from the rest of the group to be with Katie. We finally found him though when we were waiting on the side of the street for the running of the bulls. Nik showed up with this squeaky toy mallet that whenever it hit something made this shrill squeak. He was absolutely in love with this thing and thought hitting everything and anything was hilarious. About 30 minutes before the bull run, all of a sudden cops started yelling at everyone where we were waiting. We were standing right behind the big wooden fence that blocked off the side streets from the main bull run road, but it turns out there was another fence about 30 feet behind us that we were supposed to be behind. The area where we were was a safety area for the runers. So although we had staked out our spots for an hour and a half, we got kicked out 30 minutes before the bull run. The cops were NOT kind nor gentle about kicking us our either. They litereally herded us to the side of the gate and PUSHED us through, yelling the entire time. Nik though was not one to be messed with and so when the cops pushed him through he turned around and hit him on the arm with his squeaky mallet and yelled in spanish, "dont touch me!" I am sure the squeaky mallet really taught the cop a good lesson about respecting physical space. Regardless Nik was proud of himself.
The problem with seeing the bulls run is that you are on the street with them and hence at the same lateral viewing angle as them. The best/only place to actually see the bulls is if you rent a balcony. Unfortunatly the balconies are 40 Euros a person which was a bit steep for us. I think they need stadium seating to see the running of the bulls, and it should be free to sit there.
Here is the crowd of people behind me trying to see the bulls. It was absolutely packed.
Here I am in the middle of the crowd. Bring on the bulls, I want to see them run!
The guy standing right behind me had actually run with the bulls the day before so he gave me a play by play of what was happening. First they let all of the people go who changed their minds and don't actually want to run with the bulls.
Then a firecracker sounds and that means the first bull is out of the pen. A second one sounds shortly after meaning that the last bull is out of the pen. Then you just see a bunch of people running in the road. 
I think there is a bull here in the picture, you just cant see it. The thing is that when the bull runs down the road, people rush over to the side of the streets to get out of the way. So when there are lots of people on the side of the road like that it means that there is a bull in the middle of the street that they are avoiding. The run ends with another firecracker sounding to say that all of the bulls have made it into the bull pen at the end of the run. In total the run lasts about 8 minutes. If you watch from the street it takes about 5 minutes. Overall there were 2 people gored by the bulls and 5 injured in that days run.
They do replay the run though in the main plaza next to where the running of the bulls is. So we did get to see the whole thing from an aerial view which made it much more worth it. We had a crazy time in Pamplona, but now I can live to say that I have seen the running of the bulls!
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