At twelve noon, a firecracker sounded, just like in Pamplona, to notify everyone that the gate to the bullpen was open, then another to signify that all the bulls were out. Unlike in Pamplona, the Ampuero bull run is a circuit rather than a straight run, so they run out of the bullring, run through town, and then back into the bullring. I wasn’t prepared for the rush of people, including one quintagenarian, trying to scoot under the foot-high gate clearance. This is a problem in San Fermin as well, where people will “safely” enter the bull run area just to get into the bullring without paying the entrance fee. Just before the bulls returned, a noticeable tension rose in the crowd, I ducked low on my now aching knees, my camera in rapid fire mode, and held down the shutter. Click-click-click-click! And then it was over…faster than a bicycle race.

Marga and Nora stayed back, able to see over the gate to the bulls running on the slightly elevated street behind it.

Yikes!

It turns out that these aren’t even “real bulls”. Well, they are called novillos, not toros, because they are less than three years old. Bull calves. Either way, I was happy to be on my side of the steal barrier.

They used to use full grown bulls, but then five years ago, the year before we first went, one of them escaped the barriers and killed three people. It’s one thing if a runner gets hurt, but spectators have a higher expectation of safety. Truly tragic.

After the firecracker sounds letting everyone know that all the bulls are safely back in their pen, the people flood the streets. There was one goring; a 44-year-old veteran runner got a horn to the bum (photo here). It was on the outgoing run, and he got pulled under a barrier before the bulls came back. He was treated at the scene and then taken to the ICU. In the four bull runs during the festival this year, six people got ambulance rides.

Nora had a great time seeing all the people and dancing to the music.

She particularly loved these dancing giants, which she improperly calls cabezudos (this is a real cabezudo). They are really well done, made of very lightweight materials, and controlled by an operator between their legs. If you stop thinking “This is really a puppet!” for a second or two, you really do start to perceive them as enormous dancing giants, making eye contact with them, etc. Nora enjoys them at a distance of between five and twenty meters. If they’re too far, she begs to “Go see the cabezudos!” and if they get too close, she cries and buries her head in a parent’s chest.

At one point, I went into a bar to order some drinks, and this group of gentlemen came in and one of them asked the bartender for a Bordón, an excellent crianza red wine from Rioja. The bartender said he didn’t have any, so the customer begrudgingly settled for an Añares. The barkeep pulled out a glass, and the customer said, “No, we want the whole bottle.” I smiled. They did have six or seven men in their group, and a bottle of wine falls fast with six glasses. We went outside to the street to drink our drinks. A few minutes later, the singing began.

What a glorious way to spend your time, entertaining yourself and others in bars drinking wine. From what I can tell, these are traditional Cantabrian songs. The lyrics to the last bit are:

No sueño ricos tesoros,
ni sueño barcos guerreros,
sueño con las velas blancas,
sueño con ser marinero.
Tener en noche de calma,
la luna por compañera,
una guitarra en los brazos
y en mi boca una habanera.

I dream not of rich treasures,
nor of war ships,
I dream of white sails,
I dream of being a sailor.
To have a calm night,
the moon as my companion,
a guitar in my arms
and, in my mouth, a habanera.

This lovely lady was cooking a paella to serve in small rations to partygoers.

I opted to try eating goose barnacles for the second time. They were very good, but impossible to eat standing up while holding a beer, and the shells were too bulky to feel comfortable dumping on the street like sunflower seed husks, so I found a bar to eat them at.

They were so fresh, they still had seaweed and tiny baby mussels on them.

Nora demonstrates the proper way to wear your red scarf. We bought three. They are pricy, but good for many years.

We had a great time.

¡Viva Ampuero!

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It has been a huge year for Spanish sports, or España Esports. Spain’s soccer team won the World Cup, Rafael Nadal conquered Wimbledon, Alberto Contador took the Tour de France, and Javier Bardem took the world record in the Thousand Yard Smolder. His prize? Himself. But there has been a major setback in Spanish athletics.

[cut to CNN footage]

The controversial tradition of bullfighting is now illegal in one region of Spain, the Catalonia region, which includes Barcelona.

[cut back to Colbert]

I don’t understand! Barcelona should be used to horrors. Their streets are already running red with the sangria vomited by thousands of American backpackers. I’ll say it again, folks. Barcelona is just the San Francisco of Spain. They’re a bunch of effete liberal elites talking down to the rest of Spain with their sthmug Sthpanish listhps. They don’t undershtand! Heartland Spanish values like Mom and apple paella. I’m with the pro-bullfighting community who have called the ban a “political manipulation”.

Here’s the video. The first half is about the 2012 London Olympics.

Everyone here in Spain is knows that the bullfighting ban has almost nothing to do with protecting animal rights and everything to do with separatist politics and rejecting something that is traditionally Spanish. I think they should also ban jamón serrano and tortillas de patatas!

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Also, check out PartyCasino.com.

Prints and paraphernalia with this cartoon can be purchased from CartoonBank.com.

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In that article, I learned of a bullfighter named José Tomás, who came out of retirement last year to wow spectators in Barcelona, the stronghold of anti-bullfighting sentiment in Spain. Ever since, the phenomenon that is José Tomás has been snowballing. You know how they say that there’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity? Well, most of the people in the bullfighting community, including many professional bullfighters, think that José Tomás has gone way over that line. So when Marga, a fan of bullfighting, saw that JT was coming to Santander this summer, she got pretty excited. She said, “Look, it’s pretty clear that this guy’s gonna die young, so we need to see him as soon as possible.” That pretty much sums up the opinion of all bullfighting aficionados in Spain.

This past Monday, as I was doing my morning email check, I had an email from Marga saying, “Bullfighting ticket sales open at 11:00 AM today. The newspaper says people have been waiting in line since 7:00 PM last night! Can you go at 11:00 AM and buy José Tomás tickets? Please!?” At 10:30, I hopped in the car and, at 11:00 sharp, was climbing the stairs from the underground parking into the Santander town hall square where the ticket sales take place. What I saw amazed me. The line went up and down the entire square three times. I found the end and got in line.

Conversations began with people near me in line and we sent a teenager from our group up to scout out what was happening at the front of the line. We learned that, in the first 40 minutes of sales, only 20 people had bought tickets. This didn’t bode well for us in the back with over a thousand people ahead of us. We also learned that the ticket booths would close at 2:00 PM that day. Those two facts were enough for any reasonable person to give up. But then we heard, from our scout, that the vast majority of the José Tomás tickets had been “reserved” by the Town Hall for itself, pretty much guaranteeing that only a small number of ticket buyers would get to see the bullfighting legend. As in most things in life, it’s all about who you know. Since I was there on orders to buy only JT tickets, there was clearly no reason to stay. So I left.

The view from the back of the line.

A complete panorama of the entire square full of people. See larger.

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Plus, it gave me a chance to meet a second person on my blogroll. This is the second person that I have actually had a beer with after meeting them, and following their life, on the internet. You may recall the first was when I spotted Scott from South Dakota, an American video blogger in Laredo, in a local bar. I’ve been following the lives of Theresa, an americana in Pamplona (The Rain in Spain… on my blogroll), and her family for well over a year now.

So I sent Theresa an email, we exchanged mobile numbers, Marga and I watched the Sunday morning bull run live on television, and off we went to Pamplona!
Upon arrival, we parked in just about the first parking lot we could find, knowing that getting close to the city center would mean parking frustration. We parked and noticed that almost all the other cars in the parking lot had people in San Fermin attire passed out in them. Cheap hotels. As we walked the 2 kilometers or so into the city center, the number of people in the streets slowly grew, and eventually we were in the middle of the packed, most famous cobblestone street in all of Spain.

The ambiance at noon during San Fermin is probably the most calm and tranquil as it gets throughout the nine day festival, and it was still what, in any other place, could be considered riotous. This was the time of middle-aged people and families with small children to be out and about. Still, there were a few stragglers from the night before. As we entered various bars, half-closed-eyelid staggering men would try to touch Marga and put their face in front of hers, etc. But she knew to just push them aside and continue. The drunks never felt the rejection for more than a second before tottering off toward some other female.

After a few pintxos we walked three blocks in any direction and found a restaurant with only locals in it and had a quick meal that closely resembled a Full English Breakfast. More walking with an occasional entrance into a bar to use the bathroom and have another beer, and eventually we met up with Theresa and her family.

An awesome bull run mosaic on the side of the Pamplona bullring.

I took this so you can see the fence post holes neatly cut and covered in the cobblestone square in front of the town hall.

In one of the bars, the only place to sit was this window ledge where the sun came in and was absolutely heavenly. It was a little chilly and I had only worn short sleeves, so it was nice to warm back up in the bars.

Walking along the bull run towards where the bulls are released.

Looking down into the bull pen where it all starts every morning at 8:00 during the festival.

Goofing around in a guard tower that’s part of the original town wall. Theresa’s husband explained to us that the town of Pamplona has only spread outside its original medieval wall in the last 100 years. So everything outside the wall is very new, by European standards.

The Pamplona town hall is beautiful.

Sitting on one of the only pieces of bull run fence still up in the early afternoon.

Stranger photography skills.

This video is a good example of the types of sights and sounds on the streets of Pamplona.

We walked into a tourist shop where there was a big blue bull sitting on the counter. As we walked in, he waved at us. I nudged Marga and said, “Boy that’s a tough job, huh?” But she hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t just a stuffed animatronic critter. I asked Señor Toro if we could pose for a photo. If I’d had one more beer beforehand, I might have had the nerve to grab his, um, danglers, for the photo.

In case you were wondering how much it costs to see a bull run from a balcony…

Bloggers unite! Theresa, and her daughters with Marga and me.

We found this legend of a Pamplona map rather humorous/sad/good. There were four Alcohol Poisoning Attention Centers on the map.

I have to say that I am 2-for-2 with meeting people on the internet. Like Scott, Theresa and her family were wonderfully charming and interesting to talk to. Her daughters were kind enough to greet me, but didn’t say much after that. They seem to be at an age when strangers are to be observed, not interacted with. One of Theresa’s friends that was with them is actually from the tiny, tiny, tiny town where Marga’s grandfather was born in Extremadura and a five-minute drive from where we stay down there in August. Stuff like that is always pretty shocking.

We’re very glad we went and experienced the unique atmosphere that is San Fermin this year. We had such a good time, we were reluctant to leave. ¡Gracias por tu hospitalidad, Theresa!

Epilogue: On the way home, we stopped at a gas station just outside of Bilbao. As I was pumping gas, a guy my age got out of the car behind ours and asked, “D’you have a good time in Pamplona?” Confused, I said, “Yes, we did.” A minute later, I remembered I was still wearing my red scarf which clearly informed anyone who saw me where I had been that day. You forget about those things when you spend the day with like-dressed people. Funny.

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Daniel Morales is actually from Higuera de la Serena. It’s a huge deal in rural Spain to have a professional torero from your town.

Marga’s funny little frog sandals.

The government of Extremadura will give you money to fix up your house if you promise to put up a plaque saying so. I remember helping Grandpa Ramón line this one up a couple years ago. Bloody commies. They’ll even care for you if you get sick!

A panorama of the street where Grandpa Ramón’s house is. His doorway is in the center.

Back from pre-lunch drinks and waiting for paella to cook with a slightly inebriated shutter finger.

When I took this, I just thought it was a cool-looking light bulb fixture. Only later did I notice the reflection of the entire corral (what they call the inner patio place in old Spanish houses) hidden in the image.

Now we’re cooking with gas!

Adding the rice. These paella dishes (paelleros) and the special gas stoves that they fit in are available in any hardware store in Spain.

Boiling violently. Looking at this photo, I can almost smell the seafood.

Another good year for Grandpa Ramón’s grapevine.

A little tile painting that Grandpa Ramón has. It says

El día que me case,
buena cadena me eche.

Which means, roughly,

The day I get married,
a good chain I throw on myself.

Whatever that means…

I was very impressed by the “portable” bullring. All metal beams and wingnuts.

Bull in the sunset.

A little prick between the shoulder blades.

Whaddyou lookin’ at?

As I watched this flowing bull blood glisten in the evening sun, I was struck by irony that a country that is so Catholic and practices the Eucharist so sincerely religiously also practices such thinly veiled tauroctony, ritual bull sacrifices by a hero god, that clearly comes from one of the same cannibalistic, blood-drinking, pre-Christian religions from which the Eucharist ceremony originates. This never occurred to me, but it seems so blindingly obvious now.

The hero, preparing for the kill.

In goes the sword.

Look at all those poor folks that arrived late and had to take the sun-facing seats!

Daniel Morales on his knees.

Come here, Mr. Bull!

A lone flower was placed along the bullring wall.

Spanish banderillas.

The Extremadura flag waves in the sunset.

Only after single-handedly killing the strongest symbol of masculine virility can a heterosexual man walk around proudly dressed like this.

Camera starting to struggle with low light levels.

Juan drinks some wine from the bota to wash down the sandwiches we brought.

Marce thought it would be fun to throw our bota at the torero as he does his victory lap to see if he would drink from it. His assistant threw it back unopened and a little dirty.

It’s scarier in low-light blurry vision.

Things are starting to get a little Picasso.

I wouldn’t want to fight a bull after dark (or at all, really).

On our way out, we got to walk by the slaughterhouse truck and talk to the people inside who were slicing and dicing. I thought it was pretty cool, Marga, who worked for years as a slaughterhouse veterinarian, was bored by the sight, and Juan was asking if we could get a steak.

WARNING: The following images are of dead bulls and their insides. If you would like to skip them, click here.

All their legs were snapped at the ankle (see top left). I’m sure this is standard practice, but it was the grossest part to me.

Wide open.

Guts spilling out onto the floor. Check out the knife holster!

Splayed Innards

Man, I wish my teeth were that white!

Head wound.

Welcome back to the squeamish.

That night we went out to dinner.

Marga had me carry her teeny tiny lipstick.

For scale. A 0.50€ coin is about the size of a US quarter.

Marga’s friends Sonia and Emi.

Go on to Part 2.

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And now we go to Spain, where, tonight, perhaps the best known national custom is under attack. A lot of people think it’s high time to do away with a traditional pastime. They want to ban bullfighting, because, they say, it amounts to torture.

They later show a protest in the streets of Barcelona against bullfighting and drop the figure that “72% of people in the Barcelona region oppose bullfighting”.

So, in the region most opposed to bullfighting, bullfighting is almost as well supported as President Bush in his entire country. I imagine that the region of the US that most opposes Bush probably thinks that his actions “amount to torture”. Sorry, that political jab escaped unintentionally.

This is so not news in Spain. The real news in Spain is that Barcelona has lifted its ban on bullfighting and recently hosted its first bullfight in years. Chances are that that’s where the protest footage was from. So this means bullfighting opposition is weakening in Spain, not growing, as the news piece suggested. They also don’t mention that one of the main reasons that people in Catalunya (the “state” where Barcelona is located) oppose bullfighting is that they oppose anything Spanish. They want to be an independent country, with their own language and government and want little to do with Spain. From how much they won’t shut up about it, I’d say that they are even more adamant about it than the Basques. The Catalunyan separatists just aren’t dumbasses like the Basque separatists and are going about it peacefully and politically.

The other bit of context missing from the news report is that there is a protest march on the streets of Spain every single day! Every day on the news here, they show some multi-hundred crowd somewhere protesting their particular grievance in the street. People love to protest. As Michael Moore put so succinctly in Sicko, “In Europe the governments fear the people, and in the US, the people fear the government.” We’re talking about the country where, if a high school tries to change the class schedule by fifteen minutes, the entire student body goes on strike and doesn’t go to school the next day. Marga lost count of how many days of high school she missed because the student body was protesting something, often unrelated to the school administration at all. And she was usually just annoyed by missing school the way Lisa Simpson would be.

So, to conclude, they went to Y, the city most opposed to X, reported how X has been declining in Y, neglecting to mention the real news of X making a comeback in Y, and then concluded that X may soon be coming to an end. Do you think it would be fair for a Spanish news crew to go to, say, Seattle and ask about the future of NASCAR and talk about how NASCAR is clearly opposed and on the decline?¹ Not enough Harry Potter news to fill the half hour, apparently. Pretty shoddy journalism, nonetheless.

To be fair, Brian Williams remained completely neutral. That’s one of the things that makes him some of the only US news media that I can stand. He’s good at saying, “Some people oppose…”, or “According to some people…”. For that, I thank him.

¹I have no idea about NASCAR’s support or lack of support in Seattle. It was just the best example I could think of.

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I’ve seen twobullfights since, one of them with El Fandi, and neither was very good (the latter saw two of the three matadors leave the bullring in an ambulance). So when Marga saw that El Fandi was fighting in León again this year for San Juan, we absolutely had to go see him.

Most of the way to León, we stopped to change drivers, and I could admire the countryside of Castilla y León.

I witnessed this near miss in the skies above.

The other “best we’ve ever seen” thing that we experienced in León in 2005 was the San Juan fireworks display. A week ago, I discovered that my camera has a special mode designed especially for fireworks photography, so I was delighted to get a chance to try it out.

I like this one with the spectators in the foreground.

Bang!

My camera has a special “fireworks” video mode, too!

The finale was incredible.

We stayed with our friend, Luisma, who came to visit us this time last year. His mother and aunt were excellent hostesses, serving us breakfast and making a paella for lunch on Sunday.

Ever since being invited to the Choking Hazards group on Flickr, I’ve been on the lookout for suitable material. I particularly liked this scene on a shelf at Luisma’s house.

On Sunday, Marga’s parents arrived and we went out for pre-meal drinks and snacks. Marga is holding a plate of morcilla. Everyone knows that the best morcilla comes from León. And everyone in León knows that the best mocilla tapas in León comes from one particular bar. That’s where we went.

Morcilla has to have the highest “gastronomic enjoyment to appetizing appearance” ratio of any food. Even when served by a lovely señorita, it looks absolutely disgusting. I think that if I lived in León, I would go to that bar every day. Morcilla has got to be my favorite Spanish meat.

The one must-see tourist attraction of León is its cathedral.

A pudgy angel sits below a gothic tower.

Unfortunately, we didn’t go inside. Luisma says that, at night sometimes, they turn on the lights inside the cathedral, and you can enjoy the stained glass windows from the outside. The effect must be spectacular.

Buttresses a’flyin’.

Kind of a weird panorama looking up at the top of the cathedral.

I love this vertical panorama. Luisma, Juan, and Marce are looking down into a display area of ancient Roman ruins.

A few of León’s ancient Roman roots are still present today. Luisma says that it takes years to build anything that requires any digging, because everywhere you dig, there’s some archaeological goldmine that must be excavated.

European Idyll: people eating outside on a stone, pedestrian street, with cathedral spires rising in the distance.

A remake of a picture we took in 2005. Despite these hats being very typical for a bullfight, we didn’t see many on other spectators. I can’t wait for wearing hats to become fashionable again.

I’m not sure why this serious gentleman was riding around in the crowd outside the bullring. I’m sure he serves some purpose.

The León bullring has a retractable glass roof.

Luisma, Marga and her parents looking less goofy than me.

Marga’s blouse was particularly revealing from my vantage point.

At the start of every bullfight, the matadors and their cuadrillas (groups of helpers) come out to salute the president of the bullring.

The blindfolded armored cavalry follow.

The president of the bullring gives a wave.

The Tyndall Effect was really cool.

A panorama of the entire bullring.

The most impressive bullfighting, in my opinion, is the stuff that they do when the bull is still fresh with no injuries. The fact that El Fandi does stuff like that on his knees is just amazing.

What a lovely flower you’re wearing, Mr. Bull!

El Fandi could win a race running backwards. He’s incredible.

It’s most impressive when he runs backwards in front of the bull until the bull gets tired and stops.

El Fandi performs a kill. (Don’t watch if you don’t want to see an animal die.) The idea is to put the sword all the way into the bull’s torso and then make him turn sharply several times until he bleeds to death internally. It’s not a very nice way to die, I don’t think.

The roof opened up for a much needed breeze.

El Fandi communicates with the bull using semaphores.

I experienced some photographic phallus envy next to these guys.

Enrique Ponce does some stuff on his knees too, but not when the bull is fresh.

Enrique Ponce kills a bull. (Don’t watch if you don’t want to see an animal die.)

Action shot. Bullfighting really has a lot in common with dancing, particularly with the Spanish dance called Pasodoble.

When things like the horses coming out or leaving has to happen, one of the bullfighters helpers keeps the bulls attention from behind a barrier.

Bad choice of fabric color. I had to do several double takes to make sure everyone was properly clothed out there.

This is perfect banderilla technique from El Fandi. It’s just lucky chance that the bull is in focus and everything else is a blur. Sometimes my camera has moments of genius.

El Fandi broke several bones in his hand inserting these banderillas. He had to have surgery that night in the hospital.

El Fandi has to decide if he can continue with his broken hand. He does, of course, and performs the rest of the fight using only his left hand.

The only thing he did with his right hand was put in this sword to kill the bull. He must have been in a lot of pain doing this. Yeah, I know, he’s not the one that died.

The Church of San Marcos.

Sleeping stork. Delivering babies is tiring work.

After dropping Marga’s parents off at their hotel, Luisma, Marga and I went out for a few drinks.

Luisma and Marga bathed in red light. The tables were all lit orange from inside.

The bar we were in was lit entirely in red. When I went downstairs to the bathroom, it was all blue. Very cool.

I couldn’t resist photographing these two disco balls all alone in the corner. They were spinning in opposite directions.

My beer bottle looked pretty cool on the light table.

Alcohol + digital camera + cool lighting effects = pictures like this

On Monday morning, we got up, packed our bags, and headed back home, stopping just as Marga’s parents took a separate fork in the road to have lunch with them. In total, we drove more than 8 hours this weekend.

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I’m kind of glad that we didn’t go in, because when we walked away, we got to see a little bit of what goes on “backstage” at a bullfight, namely what happens with the bovine carcasses. We watched as one was unhooked from the horses that drag it out of the ring, picked up in a bulldozer (what an apt name in this instance), and loaded into the back of a truck.

In goes the bulldozer to find the “dozing” bull.

Got him, his hooves still covered in bullring sand.

In he goes. Notice the meat hooks? That’s a slaughterhouse truck.

Set him down easy, boys.

An armored horse rump.

They slide him all the way to the back.

They gotta fit six of them in there, you know.

They hose down the bloody area inside the gate.

Bloody brooms.

A group with matching t-shirts watches from the top of the bullring wall.

Also in Santoña that same day, there was a rowing race.

Row, row, row your boat…

…gently down the stream…

People lined the water’s edge for a long way. Some children were jumping into and out of the water.

I couldn’t figure out if the race was over or people were waiting for it to start, but the boats were facing in many different directions. We watched for a few minutes, but left when nothing interesting happened.

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