Hey guys, long time between updates.
At the start of July 2007, I was once again on my way to Fiestas de San Fermin in
Pamplona.
First, we had to stop by
Bilbao for a couple of days, where Wei Yang and I would meet up with Mike and Tom.
The first evening was pretty uneventful, with Wei Yang and I arriving in town late in the evening, so all we had time for was beer and tapas.
The hostel was ok, located slightly on the outskirts of town, by pure chance the world inline hockey competition was been held across the street and many of the referees were staying our hostel.
The next day we slept in and took a lazy morning in the Guggenheim museum and a walk around the old town for lunch.
In the afternoon we decided to head out towards the beach on the northern part of the city.
It was pretty windy and we were not really prepared to go out to the beach.
Mike managed to drag Wei Yang up to the top of the cliffs for an amazing view of the beach and ocean around us.
Mike had hired a car and drove us towards
Pamplona for the festival.
On the way, we stopped by in Alsasua, a village where we had organised our accommodation for this part of the trip.
We managed to get into
Pamplona in time for the “running of the nudes” which was a protest against the cruelty to animals in the up coming bullfighting.
It wasn’t much of a run more like a parade, we had plenty of time left over in the afternoon to get familiar with the city.
The day of the opening ceremony was incredible.
Everyone dressed up in their whites and crowded into square in front of the town hall.
There was champagne, sangria, tomato sauce being thrown everywhere, and the people in the balconies were also getting in on the action down below by throwing buckets of warm water.
Rockets were launched to signify the start of the festival, at which point we headed towards the Mussel Bar.
Mussel bar is a funny statue, it’s about 10-15’ tall and every year, drunk tourists (antipodeans mainly) would climb to the top of the thing and jump off, faith that their friends below would catch them.
Every year there are serious injuries as a result of this, “unfortunately” this year we didn’t see any.
We met up with a couple of students in the main square later that afternoon, with whom we caught up with for the rest of the time we were in
Pamplona.
The first day of the bull running was again very similar to what I remember from my previous trip in 2005. The streets were still filthy from the parties the evening before, people were picking themselves up either to head home from sleeping in the park all night, or to the next party. We headed to the bull ring, where we managed to get really good seats (7 from the front) for the upcoming show. The bull ring is the end point for the run; bulls would chase the runners through the city between a guided track towards the arena. Once the racing bulls were all safe in their corrals, a baby bull would be released into the ring, to chase the runners around the ring. While very energetic at the start, the bull quickly tires and then the handlers release a much larger but tamer bull which would collect the baby bull and take him back to the corrals. This is repeated for a number of times for the amusement of the spectators and runners. The rest of the festival basically consisted of eating, drinking and generally making merry with the locals. I had an awesome time but the return to London was definitely welcome as it was simply too tiring to continue partying so much.
....couple of place markers, more text to follow, links to photobucket still works.
Hey guys, long time between updates. At the start of July 2007, I was once again on my way to Fiestas de San Fermin in 
Mike had hired a car and drove us towards 
The first day of the bull running was again very similar to what I remember from my previous trip in 2005. The streets were still filthy from the parties the evening before, people were picking themselves up either to head home from sleeping in the park all night, or to the next party. We headed to the bull ring, where we managed to get really good seats (7 from the front) for the upcoming show. The bull ring is the end point for the run; bulls would chase the runners through the city between a guided track towards the arena. Once the racing bulls were all safe in their corrals, a baby bull would be released into the ring, to chase the runners around the ring. While very energetic at the start, the bull quickly tires and then the handlers release a much larger but tamer bull which would collect the baby bull and take him back to the corrals. This is repeated for a number of times for the amusement of the spectators and runners. The rest of the festival basically consisted of eating, drinking and generally making merry with the locals. I had an awesome time but the return to