The Matt Faus Blog

Wit a growing sense of familiarity, I boarded the train to Barcelona on Friday morning. Three hours later Ashley and I met to board yet another train headed to Pamplona, Spain. Nine hours and 100 Euros later we arrive in Pamplona.

It was awesome because the thousands of people there were all dressed in the traditional garb of the festival – all white clothes with a red scarf and sash. For the first of many tight situations, we boarded a bus with more people than I thought possible to make our way downtown. There we made the smart decision of stocking up on liquids at the local grocery store and the Stupid American Tourist decision of buying dinner from the street vendors. Suffice it to say that we could have fed a King’s court with the same amount of money at any other restaurant or sandwich shop.

After dinner, the sun went down and the party geared up. Walking around town there were thousands upon thousands of people singing, dancing, drinking, yelling, and just plain being crazy. One motive to wearing white for the weekend is so that the wine that everyone throws on each other looks like blood from an impaled bull – the theme, of course, of bullfights and therefore the entire festival.

We didn’t get much into the wine fighting, but reveling in the madness was very interesting. At one point there was a great fireworks display and watching the bursting colors from the lawn of downtown Pamplona was the absolute highlight of the trip.

Rambling forward, we found the bullring (Plaza de Toros) and the path that the bulls would be running in the morning. Picking and shoving through the streets, we found the length that I had planned to run. Not being able to sleep the night before due to excitement and travelling for 9 hours that day had made us very tired by this point. We didn’t want to wander too far away from the path that I was going to run, so we decided to find a patch of grass to lay our heads on.

Spreading my beach towel and lying down was great, but the drunken revelers surrounding us did not approve. That immediately began a barrage of stumbling over to chat every few minutes. A few even offered various drugs to help us stay awake. We didn’t really appreciate it, but I would have done the same thing in their situation – no one likes a party pooper. We wound up taking turns distracting the falleros enough for the other to get some shut-eye, but after a few hours we headed back to the alley we had previously chosen to run with the bulls.

In harmony with the rising of the sun, so also did the bull fences come to pass. We arrived at 6am and picked our spot as the crowd began to assemble around us. I planned to stay with Ashley until an hour before the run, and then meet up with her afterwards. However, the realization that no amount of super natural intervention could have allowed us to find each other after the running came quickly so I decided to stand with her and watch. We were also a little worried about each other’s safety, but I’m not sure who had a better reason. There was a risk of being impaled or trampled during the run, but after leaving the spectator’s crowd we were complaining of twisted bones and bruises for several hours later. After standing for three hours in a crowd the likes of a wine press, there was a flurry of activity, a pulse in the yelling of the crowd, and streaking red scarves as the runners ran by. I am able to relate this to you simply because I have a camera that I can lift far above my head and tilt the LCD screen down. We were on the second row and I could pinpoint zero bulls. Ashley saw a hoof.

Afterwards, the wine-press was released and we climbed over the fence in extreme disappointment. The first of many for that weekend, we learned. In an exhausted, frustrated, and slightly beaten state we sludged our way through the muck of the city left by the party last night back to the train station. It was pretty cool to see how advanced Pamplonian sanitation engineering is. They had tractors and brooms and leaf-blowers to pick up all the glass, plastic, and aluminum from the night before. Outside the train station we made camp on a nice grassy knoll among hundreds of other partiers and passed out for a few hours until it was time to get on the train.

Back in Barcelona, frustration after European frustration pounded our drained minds and bodies. My hostel was expenseive, scary, dirty, cramped, and disappointing. The bathrooms didn’t have toilet paper, the Chinese restaurant we had planned on eating at was closed, the coffee shop were Ashley always gets frappacinos didn’t have them, we got turned around, the Metro pass didn’t work. *Sigh* Whateryagonnado?

We gave up on our attempts to find decent food at a reasonable price and went back to Rosa Negra. The food there is awesome, and the pricing is, too. We spent the same amount of money we that we had spent in Pamplona, but ate a 3 course meal with no expense spared.

The next day we went to the beach and did absolutely nothing for the entire day – it was bliss.

Overall, the trip to Pamplona was just not worth it. We each spent 12 hours and 100 Euros on a train, 60 Euros in food and drink, 20 Euroes on souvenirs, and the experience with the running of the bulls was just not worth it. If you plan to go to Fiesta de San Fermín, you should only go if you plan to 1) Actually run with the bulls and have a sufficient group to do so, or 2) rent out one of the balconies that people own overlooking the street on the bull run.