Spain (iv): Pamplona

"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."

Of course, modern day Pamplona bears little resemblance to the one described in "The Sun Also Rises" (few things do resemble their Hemingway counterpart). As we arrived in Pamplona after the hour-long bus ride from San Sebastian, we passed first through a modern downtown urban center. High rises, office buildings, a modern bus station. If not for the sea of white clothes dotted by red bandanas like flecks of blood, Pamplona seemed terribly ordinary (that is, for Spain). As we made our way out of the bus station and to the historic district, the crowds grew thicker and the tall, utilitarian architecture gave way to the elaborate and detailed. Throughout the town, I noticed that a blue cartoon bull cutout watched down from certain balconies. This is the mascot of the company kukuxmusu, ostensibly the official souvenir purveyor for the Festival of San Fermin. Their t-shirts and other paraphernalia depict cartoon bulls (with giant balls) in the running, often in surprisingly violent circumstances. I somehow neglected to pick anything up at one of their kiosks. I also wonder how their sales do the other 51 weeks in the year.



We weren't planning on finding lodging for the night (nor could we have given how many people were there), instead we checked our bags at a municipal luggage storage service, targeted at tourists like us, and gave ourselves into the mercy of the festival crowd. The Festival of San Fermin is a week long celebration of Spanish folklore and centers around the running of the bulls and bullfights. It attracts over a million people a year and it is absolutely ridiculous. Partying begins in the late afternoon and lasts until the bull run at 8am the next day. The city cleans the apocalypse of a mess each day until it happens again. When we first began wandering the town it was pleasant and seemed well maintained. Little did we know of the disaster that would befall this place in a matter of hours.



Like I mentioned before, every where I went in Spain, people would grab me and talk to me and then ask me to take their picture. You'll notice the guys in the second picture from the bottom and how they are casually lugging around bottles of sangria. That would come into play in a big way at the bullfight.

We made our way to the arena and did a lap getting a feel for how much the scalpers were asking for tickets to that afternoon's bullfight. We found an old man seated under a tree that offered a reasonable price and bought our tickets. We headed inside while the air hummed with anticipation as before a college football game between rivals. We found our seats among the concrete steps that filled the circular tiers above the dirt stage at the center and waited for the fight to begin, happily oblivious to what we had just gotten ourselves into.



As people steadily packed themselves into the arena, the stands turned albino with chicken pox. I started to feel something dripping on me. My first thought was to look up to see if it were raining or if there were a leak. It was sunny and there was no roof over me. The dripping continued sporadically, but more and more frequently. Having given up trying to locate the source of the drip, I ignored it. That is, until a group took their seats in the row above ours carrying a giant bucket with its lid taped on with clear masking tape. My curiosity was promptly satisfied when the tape was ripped off and the reservoir of sangria inside began filling the plastic cups that were dunked vigorously into its murky, purple depths. It was then that I recalled the pink and purple stained people we saw in San Sebastian. I finally located the source of the dripping. It was a squirt gun. Filled with sangria. A portly bearded man several rows back in the adjacent section was joyously spraying his fruity, fuchsia payload indiscriminately around his general area. As revelers filed in, so too did the number of similar sangria buckets increase. More squirt guns appeared. Spray bottles, toilet brushes (dipped in buckets and waved), or just hurled cups fueled a sustained deluge of sangria for the entire two-hour duration of the bullfight. Needless to say, I have almost no pictures of this lest my camera get a cup of sangria in the face.

My seat neighbors, two guys named Innaki and Innaru, knew we were tourists and as an apology for pouring cups of sangria down my back, offered us cups of it out of their own personal bucket. I passed the first batch of it down the line to the group, but throughout the rest of the fight I think I consumed enough sangria to last me a lifetime.

"Outside the ring, after the bull-fight was over, you could not move in the crowd. We could not make our way through but had to be moved with the whole thing, slowly, as a glacier, back to town. We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight. The fiesta was going on."

As memorable as it was to endure the storm of sangria and celebrate with my newfound Spanish friends, the bullfight itself was a little upsetting. Like the city itself, the fight conveyed little of the bravery or romance I envisioned. It was not the spectacle of honor or physical artistry I had hoped for, instead I felt repulsed by the slow, ritualistic slaughter of a strong, proud animal by the small, fearful men in flamboyant outfits. Each bull (of six) reduced to fatigued, confused shells of themselves until they are put out of their misery by the matador and unceremoniously dragged out of the arena by a pair of yoked horses.

"There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people."

The remainder of the evening passed in a happy, sangria induced haze among the crowds in the now riot of a city that bore little resemblance to itself only hours before. We passed the night in a quiet corner of the town away from the still raging festivities and rested for a few hours before attempting to find somewhere to watch the running of the bulls. As we made our way there, we waded through throngs of still energetic partiers at 6am. I should note that every open cup of sangria I saw made me flinch as if it were about to be emptied over my head. We arrived at the route for the run, but underestimated how early to arrive. Without any clear vantage points, I pushed and squeezed my way to the barrier. I waited there the remaining hour while being pressed against the wooden planks of the fence by the undulating tides of the ocean of the now drunk and dingy, pink stained whites, all wanting to catch a glimpse of the bulls.



When it actually happened, it was silent and over before I knew it started. If you look closely in the last shot you can see the black coat of the bull, but that's as much as I saw. It was somewhat anticlimactic, but damned if the preceding 16 hours weren't some of the most memorable of my life.

"In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished... The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square. The cafes were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade. They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose."

The streets weren't so much being sprinkled with a hose that morning as being pressure blasted by fire hoses mounted on street sweepers. We had to jump over literal rivers of runoff and garbage. We retrieved our luggage and the rest of the group made their way to the Avis to take a car to Barcelona. Having joined the trip later in the planning process, I was to take a train. Delirious from the chaos of the festival and lack of sleep, I tried to hail a cab to the train station that lay just outside the town. Failing to do so, I decided to walk the two miles there. Not exactly sure how to get there, I blearily followed signs and walkways in what I hoped was the general direction of the Renfe station. Thankfully I found myself there after an hour or so. It was small and quaint. There was a little cafe and a sunbathed courtyard. I regret not taking any pictures of it, but I spent the following 4-5 hours passed out in a chair until my train to Barcelona arrived.