Bulls, Castles, and Monkeys - what more do you need?

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Sam and me at lunch

Last weekend I met up with a friend in Valencia who I used to work with last summer at TopGolf on Thursday night then we caught a bus to Pamplona at about 11 o’clock that night, meaning we didn’t get to Pamplona until about 5 in the morning, an hour early actually.  The streets were filled with drunks, literally drenched with wine wearing white tshirts all throughout the city…at 5 in the morning.  These are people who have stayed up all night long and in about 3 hours will run with the bulls.  It was absolutely crazy there, party city but honestly only for a week which is how long Los Sanfermines last, or the running of the bulls.  The Spanish culture is very much a party culture, which I learned last year in my cultures class.  Every celebration lasts a week, and it couldn’t be sadder when it’s over.  For example, Los Sanfermines end on the 13^th and they literally have a song called “Pobre de mí.” The last day they all have candles and they take off their bandanas and sing the song bringing them to tears.  The US may think they party hard, but honestly when we’re sitting down to dinner, Europe is waking up from their siesta (nap) to start the other half of their day.  Dinner isn’t until about 10 o’clock here.  Anyways, the running of the bulls started at 8 and we got really good seats at the start of the path behind a fence which was reserved for EMTs and police officers.  The start of the running is cued by a cohete, or a shot into the air.  The first shot indicates the bulls have been released, the second that they are on the streets, and the last that they have made it to the arena.  After the first shot you wouldn’t believe the amount of guys who already had panicked and jumped the fence, which explains the quality of my video.  The whole running really only takes about 2 ½ minutes, so in front of us they were gone within seconds.

Eliza and me
at the festival

Parade outside the church

Texas friends

Parade outside

My friend who is living in Valencia, Sam, has been there for the past year with a bunch of other students on a first year abroad program.  The group in is about 200 freshman from Florida State University and we had about 15 of them with us but saw several others in the city.  All of them ran except for 2 of the girls that hung with me and a friend from Madrid, Eliza.  There were so many people who were telling the girls with us not to run but they survived!  They didn’t run the whole way only up until the corner.  There were some guys from the University of Texas who we saw a few times throughout the day.  During the run they said they laid on the ground for the bulls to jump over them but they didn’t quite jump all the way so you can see his battle wounds, which is pretty cool.  This is also something I studied for class, Los Sanfermines, so when they did the parade it was pretty cool because I’d seen pictures and things before.  One thing it didn’t show in my research was the guys with these masks on had a stick with a string and a ball at the end and they literally hit you with the ball like really hard.  I still don’t quite understand why they did that yet, but this parade of giants is the start of the procession for church.

El Camino de Santiago tracks

Oldest cathedral

The rest of the day we were exhausted and ended up napping on a hill behind a building and then got on the bus again that night at 10:30.  We got back in Valencia at about 5:30 in the morning and we went back to our place and slept for a while.  For lunch we went and tried agua de Valencia which is similar to a mimosa but with a lot more alcohol, so after that we ended up needing a nap.  But we ate by a cathedral, the oldest in Valencia.  If you haven’t heard about the Camino de Santiago, it’s a religious path that goes to Galicia, a region in the northwest of Spain where the tomb of Saint James is.  Well there are several different paths but you see these markers on the streets and the sides of buildings throughout Pamplona and Valencia, so that was cool to see.  The whole walk takes about a month, at the end or for at the least a week of the walk, you are recognized by the Vatican.  

For dinner we went to an Italian restaurant which was absolutely amazing, and now I can’t wait for Italy next weekend.  The pizza I got had onions, pepperoni (more chorizo like), chicken, tomatoes, and cheese.

Our last day in Valencia we went to the beach and hung out then got paella Valenciana which has polo, conejo, y verduras – chicken, rabbit, and vegetables.  Rabbit is amazing… it is juicy and sweet which makes it pretty tasty.  Valencia, which is on the east coast of Spain, is the origin of paella, the rice dish I had mentioned earlier in the trip.  So that is the “traditional” paella.  So that made for a good meal before we got on the bullet train back to Madrid, which went about 300 km/hour and got us back in an hour and a half.  

We met up with some students for dinner and tried what’s called torreznitos – fried pig skin.  It honestly was like chunks of juicy, greasy bacon.  I could eat maybe one or two and that was it but the best part of the meal was

cazon en adobo – dogfish.  This was fried and had lemon juice in it and it was amazing. 

Front of Escorial

Tuesday I went on the field trip to the Escorial, one of the many castles here.  It was huge full of so many tombs…pretty creepy if you ask me.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside but there were rooms and rooms full of paintings by several different famous artists.  It had a cathedral and a room with a bunch of parts of Saint’s bodies some dating back to 72 AD.  The bottom floor had coffins everywhere with the bodies of the past kings and queens of Spain as well as the Dukes, Duchesses, Princes and Princesses.  It was like a cemetery throughout, it also had some royalty from other countries.  The outside had gorgeous gardens that reminded me of the Princess Diaries to be completely honest.  

Only one side of the castle, not even all of it

Wednesday some students and I went to a beer bar and I tried a couple beers from Belgium which were amazing, just like everything else here!  The Belgian beer was 10% alcohol, twice as much as usual for American beer.

The next field trip on Thursday I went to the zoo with the intro to anthropology class and we saw all of the primates.  Here they have a way to be in the exhibit with the Lemurs, unfortunately we didn’t do it but it looked pretty cool.

I’m now on a bus to Barcelona for the weekend with about 30 students so you will get several amazing pictures of Sagrada Familia, Parque Güell, and la playa.