2008 Woodie Awards
I darted through the drunken crowd, tailing my 65-year-old house mother. I couldn’t see or hear her, but I gripped her hand and prayed we wouldn’t get separated. My friend Danielle trailed somewhere behind me.
Atrocious odors hung in the air, and the stench of urine and beer oozed from everything and everyone. The sidewalks and grass were covered in broken glass, plastic cups, and smashed food containers. Thousands of drunken people swarmed the plaza stadium, chanting and dumping bottles of wine on their friends.
We tripped over a pile of young people, passed out at the foot of a monument of a giant bull. Five empty bottles of champagne and the remains of a case of Heineken sat at their feet.
“A San Fermín pedimos,
por ser nuestro patrón,
nos guíe en el encierro
dándonos su bendición.”
“We ask San Fermín,
as our Patron,
to guide us through the Bull Run
and give us his blessing.”
Welcome to the Running of the Bulls.
Every year, travelers journey across the world for the Festival of San Fermín, a week-long party in Pamplona, Spain: the only European city where it’s legal to sleep in the streets. The city nearly shuts down entirely, and the locals bolt their doors until the storm passes.
Just like the Hawkeyes wear variations of black and gold, San Fermín partygoers have a uniform and nobody strays from the dress code: white pants, white shirt, and a red pañuelo around the neck, displaying the region of Spain from which each comes.
We stopped, and Tina, my feisty house mother, picked a fight with a ticket scalper to get us into the plaza. My watch read 7:51. We had nine minutes to get into the stadium before the running began.
San Fermín defines chaos: It’s a mix between an anarchist protest, Kinnick stadium on a Saturday morning during football season, a Girls Gone Wild Spring Break video, and Ibiza.
Tina yanked on my hand. I grabbed my friend and we slipped into the stadium with minutes to spare. We squeezed onto a wet concrete bench next to a pack of what I imagined to be Animal House or Real World: Spain castoffs. The young fellow to my right dropped his joint on my lap, and Tina shouted in my ear.
“They’ve been awake and partying since yesterday afternoon,” she yelled in Spanish. She leaned over me, and he offered her the recovered joint. She laughed. “No thank you! To San Fermín!”
A roar went up from the wild crowd as four men came running into the stadium, pumping their arms. I lifted my camera to snap a photo, but Tina stopped me.
“They didn’t run,” she said, tapping my watch. The crowd began chucking trash at the men, and screaming vulgar chants about their mothers. “It’s not 8 a.m. yet. They snuck into the stadium. Wait.”
At 8 a.m., we heard the distant sound of a flare gun. The encierro, or the running, had begun. The half-mile encierro is a walled-in path through Pamplona’s cobblestone streets, and it ends in the bullfighting plaza. Running with the bulls is about as safe as diving naked into a tank of dirty needles, but hundreds of men poured into the plaza two minutes later, tailed closely by a pack of giant, furious bulls. The runners scrambled to get to safety along the outside of the ring, and the crowd went nuts as several men narrowly escaped getting gored.
Within minutes, all the bulls were herded out of the ring, and the entertainment began. Six vacas locas, or crazy cows, were released into the plaza one at a time to “play” with the runners. While crazy cows may just sound like a fun flavor of ice cream, playing with them gets a little rough. These are not friendly Iowa milk cows. They are dark and mysterious and very pissed off. They’re smaller than the bulls, and their horns have been covered to protect the runners from getting impaled.
“More violence!” the guy next to me shouted, spilling his beer on his lap. “Kill them all!”
Good to know that rednecks exist outside the States. One by one, the cows bucked and knocked down foreigners eager to prove their masculinity. By this point, the runners’ testosterone levels were sky-high. A few ran like they were on fire every time a bull looked in their direction, but the majority ripped off their shirts and egged on the bulls, begging to have their moment of Pamplona fame.
The runners milled around the arena as the plaza emptied out into the streets, some to pass out on the sidewalks and some to continue partying (“The night starts now!” the guy next to me shouted, smashing a plastic cup on his forehead). We picked our way through the trashed city with images of the bulls fresh in our minds, knowing we had just witnessed a famous tradition that we’d never forget.
“Pobre de mí, pobre de mí,
que se acaban las fiestas
de San Fermín.”
“Poor old me, poor old me,
They’ve just finished the festivals
of San Fermín.”
Ann
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