Early on I my trip over here, I met a travel buddy. She suggested to go to the San Fermin Festival. This was made famous by Ernest Hemingway in a book called "The Sun Also Rises" and takes places in Pamplona, Spain every year. I had never really considered going, but it seemed to be one of those bucket list opportunities, so why not?!
Pamplona isn't exactly a straight shot from Geneva so the first stop of the journey was Madrid. Gosh, I loved Madrid, I want to go back and experience so much more of it than a Thursday evening and Friday afternoon. We stayed at the most beautiful hostel ever, I would even pick it over a lot of other places I've stayed! They host tapas tours, flamenco dance lessons, etc. thursday evening we enjoyed the weather, some yummy tapas and hit a few local bars. Then on Saturday we set off on a 3 mile journey over to the Real Madrid Futbol stadium. Obviously the soccer roots don't come from me, but this was incredibly impressive. We did a guided tour and got to see locker rooms, field level and even received full on explanations of the history of Real Madrid, which was incredibly interesting. Unfortunately that was all the time we had in Madrid so after some delicious tapas, amazing churros and chocolate, we headed to the train station for the 3 hour train ride to Pamplona...clearly not knowing what we were in for!
This Pamplona trip took the most amount of planning of anything so far. Tens of thousands of people attend the San Fermin festival every year, so accommodations, balcony reservations and bull fight tickets were not exactly, easy to come by. We stayed in the middle of the madness, we had bull run balcony tickets at "Dead man's corner" and our bull fight tickets were far enough away to not see EVERYTHING that was going on, thank goodness!
It's funny, because if someone asked me to go back, I would say absolutely not, but the stories I have to tell are rare. For example, when they say people party in the streets all night long, you don't really take that literally, but I'm here to tell you, that is so very true. We would go to bed at 1ish, with ear plugs, and wake up at 6, still with ear plugs in, but literally parades happening right outside our windows. You have no choice but to buy a giant bottle of sangria for 2 euros and join in the celebrations. Pamplona itself, seems like it has potential, but the poor town is just destroyed for the two weeks of San Fermin.
Probably the craziest part of our trip was watching the running with the bulls. These people have been partying all night long and then line up to run with wild animals. We rented the balcony of this sweet Spanish woman who made us coffee and a spanish breakfast. We waited there starting at 6:30 am for the festivities to start and then come 8:05 the run was over in just 5 minutes. But then the real drama began. We heard our little spanish woman yelling at the TV, so we went and looked. Apparently, there were so many people running that day, that in the entry way of the stadium where the run ends, the entrance became jammed. People were trampling, stuck and had no where to go, which in turn became a disaster when the bulls had no where to go. The bulls ran into the jam of people, and then more people piled on from there. People were swimming over others, being trampled, or ducking into crawl spaces to get away from the madness. At the end of the day, 23 people went to the hospital, but thankfully, no deaths occurred.
The whole experience, was just crazy. It is officially checked off my bucket list.
No comments:
Post a Comment