On Monday
morning, I woke up, ate some cornflakes, paid a credit card bill, and checked my
bank accounts. “OK… So if I don’t eat for the next two weeks, that should make
up for all the money I’ve recently spent,” I said to myself.
I had little on my agenda other than entertaining a friend, JT, who was in town, and neither of us had much interest in Pamplona's Running of the Bulls.
Personally, I'd never read Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises (or actually any Hemmingway book). The event as a whole didn’t really interest me and its timing fell outside of my just-completed six-week tour of Spain and Portugal.
I'm not sure why JT wasn't into it, but that's probably why we've been friends for nearly 20 years.
After my
mundane morning routine, JT’s law school chum, Jake arrived to use our place for a
temporary layover between Geneva and Pamplona, where he would actually take advantage of the San Fermin festival.
By afternoon
JT was contemplating tagging along to Pamplona, but my early morning budget
review was still weighing me down. I couldn’t justify taking a spur of the
moment trip after just completing a 43-day adventure, especially when a few
hours earlier I considered starving myself to save some dinero.
I told the
guys to have fun, then I bounced out the door to head to Carrefour to buy more corn flakes to cheaply sustain myself for the next few weeks. On my walk, indecision
became an even more crippling disease than it normally is for me.
I paced in
circles for a few minutes, then I met JT and Jake on the street and further dragged out my indecision as I walked
them to the metro that would take them to the train station. Halfway through the walk, I said, "You only live once," remembered how much I hate people who say YOLO, and decided to go with them.
They had no
plan on where they were sleeping that night in Pamplona, but I convinced myself
that it would be part of the fun and that sleeping outside wouldn’t suck that much.
A four-hour
train ride later and we were in Pamplona. The station was full of the worst
kind of people, by that I mean drunk guys with fedoras and sleeve
tattoos.
We walked
through the freshly imported revelers to the bus stop, where there were
scotch-taped flyers advertising rooms for rent.
I called the
first number. No answer.
I called the
second one. A guy named Maximo answered and after some quick negotiating we
had a room for 20€ a person. Better yet, Maximo was going to come pick us up
and take us to the place
While we waited
for Maximo to drive up, we gained a fourth member to our team. A guy from
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who was as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as they come. He
sported a weird crew cut, grey wifebeater, camo Lee Dungaree shorts, black high-tops,
and the most PA hick voice you’ve ever heard.
Harrisburg
(we never got his name) didn’t speak a lick of Spanish, so the kind soul that I
am, I took him under my wing and told him he could tag along.
Fifteen
minutes after I called, a very gruff, very suspicious looking fellow in a dirty Nike
sweatsuit walked up, sans car. He flashed a smile that revealed all of his two
teeth and said “Soy Maximo.”
Alright…
I made sure
Maximo had a room for Mr. Central PA and we were off.
As we walked
through the outskirts of Pamplona, I make small talk with Maximo. I learned
that he was from Russia and is control of filling various resident’s apartments
with tourists.
The small
talk took my level of suspicion from 80% to about 10% that Maximo was walking
us into a back alley to rob us.
We got to
the apartment without having a gun and/or knife shoved in our faces and were
shown our room. There was a single bed and a double-bed with a headboard that
read “Mami” and “Papi.”
I told JT
and Jake that I’m engaged and can’t sleep with anyone else so they’d have to
take the double bed for a night of mami-y-papi role playing.
I then helped
Harrisburg straighten out his accommodations with the Spanish-speaking-only
Maximo.
At one point
Harrisburg asks where Maximo was from. I told him St. Petersburg.
Harrisburg said, “FLORIDA?!” in the most beautifully ignorant PA twang you’ve ever heard.
“No.
Russia,” I replied.
We asked Maximo a few more questions about la
corrida. At this point I realized that the entire running lasts just over
two minutes, as I had thought it was a full-day festivity.
"God dammit," I said as I began to feel that I was not that much smarter than
Harrisburg.
Then we
tried to crash before we’d all have to get up early for the running which
starts at 8 am.
Jake was the
only one of us who planned on running, so he had to get up at 4:30 to get a
spot in the run. JT and I would watch, which meant we had to get up at 6:30 to secure a spot for the spectacle.
Part of me
wanted to run, but the other 99% of me realized the possibly getting killed,
gored, or put in a hospital where I might be deported (this was before I learned about Spain's anti-extradition laws), all outweighed whatever
street cred I stood to gain. And Sarah made me promise I wouldn’t run.
Right before
I passed out, Sarah called to tell me she learned that Ben from Thrillist would
be running and I should look for him.
There were
two Bens at Thrillist when I worked there (actually there were three, but the
third was a feminine homosexual who never seemed like Running of the Bulls type).
I assumed
the Ben who was there was Ben Lerer, Thrillist’s co-founder, who with his shit
ton of money could easily afford to fly to Spain just for the Running of the
Bulls. Plus the whole machismo-running thing seemed like something Lerer would
do.
I got mildly
depressed over the obvious microcosm. The fact that I’m watching, while Lerer
runs is why he’s a millionaire with his own company and angel fund investment
firm, while I’m a broke-ass copywriter who has to sustain himself on
cornflakes. (The fact that Lerer was born into Manhattan royalty, while I was
born into a family that ran a suburban Chicago hot dog restaurant doesn’t play
into this equation.)
As the sun began to rise like Hemmingway said it would, JT and I headed to Pamplona’s old city.
I’d never
seen a grosser first-world neighborhood in my life. Every square centimeter was
covered in alcohol, broken glass, and trash. The smell of booze was 100 times
more pungent than anything I ever witnessed in college.
At 7 am bars
were still selling booze to patrons who appeared to be going on hour 96 of
thrashing their livers.
Sixty minutes before the run began, it was nearly impossible to find a spot with a view.
Twenty minutes into our search, the best we could find was a position, kneeling
in the aforementioned grossness, peeking through dangling legs and two
barricades that lined the route.
This would
have been OK if I were 10 years old sneaking into Yankee Stadium to catch a
glimpse of Babe Ruth, but there was no childhood Americana charm and a bunch of drunk tourists ain't no Babe Ruth.
Within two
seconds, we went off to find a better spot. We discovered the Town Hall
building's elevated statues, which we could climb and see the start of the race.
We spent the
next 30 minutes standing between a statue of a soldier and two columns. This eclipsed
my previous record of standing between a statue and granite columns by 30 minutes.
As I stared
into the densely packed crowd of white and red, my half-awake mind sputtered
introspectively and realized this event was no different than a NASCAR race to
the novice viewer. I came there to see a crash dammit, I just hoped that crash (in
this case a goring) wouldn’t involve Jake or whichever Ben was there.
Finally, the
fireworks blasted and the run was on.
No more than
20 seconds later, the runners and bulls had passed and my viewing experience
was over. The Run made the Kentucky Derby seem like an 18-inning ballgame.
Even with a
great angle, I didn’t see anything. I maybe saw someone twist an ankle. Maybe.
Underwhelming
would be an understatement.
We walked
back through the stream of street alcohol to the bullring, where the run
concludes.
We squeezed
our way through the masses and watched all the runners “play” with the bulls in
the ring. I’m still not sure what the goals were, but jumping over the bulls
was applauded and any attempt to subdue the bull was greeted with boos and a
human-powered ass-kicking.
I learned the rules while watching. Others learned first hand, such as the kid who hopped on the back of the bull and rode it as it bucked three times. Shortly there after he was
pulled off to be kicked in the head and chest a handful of times until security
could pull him out of the ring.
Another guy
tried to control the bull by grabbing its horns. He too had the shit beat out
of him by a roaming mob as the spectators chanted “coño” and threw whatever
they could at him.
By 8:30 in
the morning all the running-related festivities were done and we had the rest
of the day to explore a town that had little to offer other than their
festival.
Seeing San Fermin in person was slightly better than going to market, but not by much. I think next time there's a tourist-trap festival in Spain, I'll save myself the trouble, pour a bowl of cornflakes, and just read the classic novel about it**.
---
*I should note that Ben Robinson is an amazing dude and I respect
his collection of model Deloreans and Wu-Tang records just as much, if not more
than I respect Lerer’s attempt to own a stake in every Manhattan-based
start-up.
**On that note, if anyone can recommend me a book about La Tomatina, that would be great.
