July 9

(15:00) After the concert started, we moved up to the front row, where we stayed for about a half hour. We soon got tired of standing in the cold, however, and decided to try our hand at the other side of the parking garage. We soon found ourselves trying to sleep in a corner of the staircase going down to the parking garage. This sleep was fairly worthless as we woke up about two hours later (around 5:00 am) more sore than when we fell asleep. We got up and started walking toward the starting point where the bulls were to be released. We soon realized that we didn’t need to be there as early as we had thought. Since it was still cold out we had to find a store or something to sit down in until the time to run drew nearer.

I failed to mention yesterday that we had purchased traditional San Fermin attire for the festival. Apparently, it is offensive to the locals if you don’t run in the traditional white clothes with a red scarf and sash. However, as long as you were dressed in red and white and had the red scarf, you would fit in just fine. We were told that people could get beaten by locals for doing one of two things: not wearing the San Fermin garb and touching the bull with the bare hands. Both are considered disrespectful, although you are allowed to touch the bull with a newspaper (as nearly all the runners had equipped themselves with). So Ben bought the entire set (white Capri pants, a red handkerchief, and a red sash. He borrowed my white shirt and he was all set. I simply wore my white khaki shorts and my red Munger softball t-shirt to represent my team in Pamplona. I did purchase the red handkerchief though, to look as authentic as I could.

Anyway, as the time to run drew nearer the street where the running would take place began to get absolutely packed. There was nothing but red and white as far as the eye could see. It was truly an amazing spectacle. I was able to take some videos and photos, but cameras were strictly forbidden to the runners so I had to make sure none of the dozens of police saw me. At 7:30 am, the stores along the street all pulled down their gates to close up while the running was taking place.

The bulls run at 8:00 am sharp every morning. At about 7:50 am, the crowd went into a chant and then began cheering wildly. The same thing happened about five minutes later. I began to try to get loose and I strapped up the Velcros to get ready to run. At this point, we knew very little as to what to expect. All we knew was that when the first firecracker went off it had meant that the bulls had been released. When we heard the firecracker, a mass of people started running. We were told that we should wait until the second firecracker, which signified that the bulls had crossed a certain point and were getting close, before we should start to run. Once we heard the second firecracker, we hesitantly began to run out into the street. At that moment, we saw about five 1,500 pound bulls racing toward us. We dove back to the side as the bulls went flying by. We were told earlier that there was no way we could keep up with the bulls; that they end up passing everybody on the way to the stadium, no matter how soon you start. Since the group had already passed, we took off sprinting behind them. We remembered that they also released a group of domestic bulls to run behind them to make sure that the wild ones keep moving. We soon saw those approaching and dove off to the side again to make sure to stay out of their way. We knew that we were in the clear now and had to sprint to try to make it into the stadium to be a part of the bull fight before they closed the doors. Sure enough, the doors had long been closed by the time we made the half mile sprint up the road….and by “up” the road, I literally mean “uphill.” The entire track toward the stadium is uphill, which drastically reduces my half mile sprint time. In hindsight, we now know that we should have began running much sooner. We would have then been right in the rush and would have actually been sprinting in front of the bulls for a while, which would have been an awesome thrill. It also would have given us the opportunity to make it into the stadium and participate in the bull fighting festivities. The first thing that happens inside the stadium is the release of a baby bull in which the participants are expected to taunt and see how close they can get without getting gored. The crowd expects everybody that makes it into the stadium to participate and they will boo you if you climb out early. Soon after they have an actual bull fight in which the bull is eventually slaughtered in front of the entire crowd. Since we didn’t make it into the stadium, I can only tell you about what I have heard, because we were not able to witness it firsthand. However, I’m glad we waited to run in order to be more safe since we were unsure of what to expect. Next time we run, someday, we will then know how to handle ourselves.

Once we realized that we weren’t getting into the stadium, we began our trek back to city hall to collect our bags and then head back to the train station. The debris from the night before was unexplainable. Piles upon piles of trash littered the streets while maintenance crews worked to clean up the area. You couldn’t even walk without stepping on beer bottles and cups. The amazing thing is that the road was fairly clean when we arrived the previous evening. This means that this wasn’t an accumulation of trash over the course of three days, but only one night. The festival runs for ten days straight. Imagine if they didn’t clean up the streets every morning.

Anyway, we made it back to the train station to find out that all the trains to Madrid were booked until 2:35 pm. This meant that we had five and a half hour wait until our train left. We have a half hour lay over in Madrid and then we are off to Alicante to hopefully meet up with Tiff. We were able to take a nap in the park while we waited for our train, but we still can’t wait until we can sleep an entire night on one of Tiff’s two couches. I have no idea how much we have slept since the ferry, but I know it hasn’t been much. We find ourselves only sleeping when we feel tired, which usually turns out to be on a train or while waiting for a train, so we never sleep for more than a couple hours. We are on the train to Madrid at the moment. The scenery of the Pyrenees mountains was gorgeous. I wish I could have taken more pictures. . Hopefully Tiff will have internet somewhere handy so I can post again soon.

(24:00) It was interesting to watch the thermometer fluctuate as we rode away from the mountains. In Pamplona, it was 21° C (about 70° F). As we rode out of Madrid, it got up to 36° C (about 100° F). Then once we got to Alicante, it was again down in the mid to lower twenties. We ended up getting to Alicante alright, but found our little sheet of paper with Tiff’s address didn’t have all the information we needed. We first asked a guy at the train station where he thought the paper was leading us. In broken English he pointed us down a street for two blocks and then had us turn right. We did this successfully but couldn’t figure out what building was supposed to be Tiff’s. We ended up stopping at a bar to ask directions. One lady working there tried for about ten minutes to help us out. Finally, her solution was to go to every building and ring the bell for all the first floor apartments. We did this once and got yelled at in Spanish, but the street was only a couple blocks long so we were hopeful. Just then, we heard a girl yell “There they are!” It was Tiff and her roommate. Apparently, they had walked to the train station to meet us there as I had suggested, but we left before they got there. Either way, we had found them and their apartment, equipped with two couches and a shower. We also had the privilege of meeting one of Tiff’s roommates, Kelsey. She is a very special character to say the least. She told us how she has a few job offers back in the States making a lot of money. During the same conversation, we had to explain to her that Austria was an actual country. I’m not sure how Tiff can handle more than a few hours of her at a time.

It is a cool night, according to Tiff, but it still is about 75° F. As soon as I got out of the shower I was sweating again, but I did feel more refreshed. We ended up walking down to the beach and tried a little Sangria before walking home and crashing on the couch.

July 10

We woke up feeling amazingly refreshed. It had been the first time we had slept for more than a couple hours at a time in quite some time. My body actually felt groggy because it wasn’t used to getting so much sleep. We had a little something to eat and then sent Tiff and her roommate off to class for the day. They told us that we could help ourselves to anything in the fridge or cupboards. This was not a good idea for their sake. We did indeed help ourselves. We eventually ended up buying groceries later to help make up for the havoc we wreaked in the kitchen.

While Tiff was gone to class, we were able to do our laundry in Tiff’s washing machine. We had successfully made it three weeks without doing any laundry. I found that this is only possibly by wearing the same shirt for a week straight and wearing your socks and underwear into the shower to get them clean. While the laundry was washing, Ben and I had to find a way to entertain ourselves. We came up with a card throwing game where we simply sat on the couch and tried to flip cards into a basket half way across the room. We used tennis style scoring in honor of Wimbledon. Sadly, I find it hard to admit that Ben came back to win three sets in a row to take the match in four sets. After the match, we were dripping with sweat from the intense competition (and possibly the 90 degree temperature) so we called it quits. We turned on the television hoping to find something in English. Nothing was, but we were able to determine from the Spanish news that somebody had died while running with the bulls either that morning or the previous morning when we were there. We didn’t see any major scene while we ran so I am guessing that it was the day after, however, we did see multiple ambulances driving away afterward. Either way, we did know that nobody had died since 1995 so it was quite a milestone day.

Anyway, once Tiff got back, Ben and I went grocery shopping. It was an amazing feeling that we could buy whatever we wanted and would actually be able to cook and prepare it. We bought five pounds of potatoes, six pork chops, a bag of frozen green beans, a dozen eggs, and a liter and a half of milk. It was all for a reasonable price as well, so we were pretty excited.

Once we got back, the four of us found a Chinese restaurant with decent prices. It wasn’t a buffet like we had been craving, but it would do. I ordered the family size plate of fried rice. The server kept thinking I meant something else because it was meant to feed four people. I had to explain to him through hand gestures that it was exactly what I wanted. He laughed and nodded “okay.” The food was delicious and I was stuffed. It was a great meal. We then went to the train station to purchase our tickets to Barcelona for the following day. We are going to be happy to get out of Spain simply because they charge us 7.00 Euros for every ticket as a reservation fee even though the Eurail Pass is advertised as unlimited free travel. Hopefully the other countries are not nearly as expensive.

Once we got back, it was still terribly hot outside, so the three of us went to the beach. On our way to the beach, Ben and I were going to attempt to fit in with the locals by purchasing a couple Speedos. We didn’t have a swim suit so we thought that the lightest version would be best. We went to a small convenience store that had a couple racks of beach attire. We found a rack with a couple dozen Speedos and started looking through them. We thought they looked rather small and they only had colors like bright yellow, pink, and powder blue. Right on the verge of us picking one out to purchase, a gentlemen came up to us and informed us that those were for girls. Fighting embarrassment, we went and checked out the two male Speedos. Both were black and twice the price of the others. We decided that a black Speedo might act like an oven; an oven cooking rocky mountain oysters. We passed.

We went to the beach and ended up going into the Mediterranean Sea in our shorts. The Mediterranean is terrible salty. I hardly even had to tread water because I practically floated. We ended up staying on the beach for quite a few hours. It was slightly before midnight before we decided that we should go home and cook dinner. I ended up cooking the pork chops and green beans (just like Granny taught me). Ben was in charge of the mashed potatoes, his specialty. Tiff decided that she was going to cook some pasta. I’m not sure how we ended up eating all that food among the three of us, but I could hardly move when we got done eating. Soon after, we crashed again for another awesome sleep on the couch.

July 11

(16:30) We slept in late yet again. I am afraid that we are spoiling ourselves with all this sleep and it might be hard to get back to our old sleep schedule in a couple days. We packed up are bags with all our clothes that were now dry, showered, and started making breakfast. We had some potatoes left and the dozen eggs, so it looked like we would be stuffing ourselves again. I fried up the potatoes and Ben scrambled the eggs. Again, afterward we had to collapse on the couch because we were having a hard time moving. Normally back at home, this amount of food would be a normal meal. Here, it was a ridiculous amount of food that my stomach still isn’t used to. I hope it doesn’t get used to it either, because I know this trend won’t last long.

After we recovered enough to move, I used Tiff’s sewing kit to sew my button back on my khaki shorts. I lost two off the button-up fly since we’ve been here so sewing the top one back on basically added another pair of shorts to my wardrobe. Meanwhile, Ben was going through house cleaning withdrawals so he took the opportunity to spit shine the entire kitchen. It was funny to see him get upset with things being out of place before he realized that it wasn’t his house and he didn’t have to worry about it.

Once we left the apartment, we picked up one of Tiff’s friends and headed to an internet café to book a room in Barcelona for the night. It took us way too long, so I wasn’t able to update anything online like I had hoped. I did have time to check my bank account to find out I was charged for a night at a hostel in which we didn’t even stay, so I’m going to have to try and find a time and a way to sort that mess out. Anyway, the four of us then went to the train station to catch the train to Barcelona which means the blog is now updated to the second.

(24:00) The train ride to Barcelona was long and tedious due to the fact that the train company decided to use their oldest, slowest train they had for one of the most popular routes in the country. The trip took over five hours and the train was twenty minutes late to begin with. Ben and I had to sit in seats that were facing two other seats so we had no leg room whatsoever. Luckily, the view was pretty amazing, especially as we got closer to Barcelona. The last leg of the trip was right along the coast of the Mediterranean. We saw miles of beaches and a rocky coastline. There were points when we would be hovering over the water on a bridge on the edge of a cliff and then instantly be inside a tunnel going through a cliff. It definitely helped to pass the time.

Once we arrived, we realized that we again had failed to plan accordingly. Our first task was to get a train toward Marseilles the next day. We stood in line at one booth and once we got to the front, all they could tell us was that we had to go to another booth. Once we made it through that line, they told us that we had to go to a different booth. Finally, the third booth told us that there were no trains toward Marseilles until Monday night. We told him that we didn’t care where we had to go to find a train to Marseilles, we just needed to get there by early Monday. All he could tell us was to get a ticket to go to another station and they might have a train going that way. I can’t tell you how disappointed we are with the Spanish train system. You would think that if every train is always booked solid days in advance, that you could make more money by having more trains running. Then again, the Spanish do take a four hour break in the middle of each day and call it Siesta. Just add it to the list of cultural differences we have experienced.

Anyway, once we got through with the ticket people, we then realized that we had no idea where our hotel was. We had the address but had no idea where the road might be. We asked some locals, but they had no clue. We later found that this was because the street is only a couple blocks long. We started walking away from the train station until I spotted an internet shop. We used it to find the general direction of our hotel, which was actually quite a ways away. The next task was to find out what subway line would get us the closest. We had to walk back to the train station to find the metro. Since Tiff’s friend Chauna speaks fluent Spanish (being from Texas) we were able to ask for directions from the locals. They are all very nice and helpful, but only a few speak English.

It was about 11:00 pm before we even figured out where we needed to go. At that point, Ben and I hadn’t eaten anything since 11:00 am this morning. We had eaten such a big breakfast that we didn’t even think about food until we were half way to Barcelona. We walked in circles around the metro station before we figured out which one we needed to take. Once our train arrived, we had to push our way onto the train just to have enough space for the four of us. I accidentally drilled a guy in the face when I swung around with my backpack on and I’m pretty sure I leaned against another girl the whole time just to stay upright. Once we got out of there, I had sweat pouring down my face and I couldn’t feel my left arm from holding myself up. When we finally got to the hotel room, all we could think about was getting food. We asked the lady at the front desk where we could get food this late. She directed us back to the metro station that we had just gotten off. We walked back there and was walking up to a restaurant right as the lights went out. We then walked to another bar close by. We asked if we could order food (or I should say that we asked Chauna to ask if we could order food) but they said the grill was closed. The waitress told us that we could order cold salads though, so we sat down and told her what we wanted. A few minutes later she explained to Chauna that they didn’t have any so there was no food. I saw that they had a little snack food bar with chips and candy bars so I ate a few things from that to hold me over. We sat around for a little while before heading back to the hotel. Once we got there, I went in search of a vending machine. The one with candy in it was not working, but then I turned and saw the most glorious site. There was a vending machine with frozen dinners in it and a microwave in the common room. I was in heaven with whatever kind of meat and potatoes that I bought. I still don’t know what exactly I ate, but it was tasty and filling.
After that, we went back up to the room and I immediately laid claim to the bath tub. They have a really nice bathroom here with a huge bathtub. I drew myself a bath and laid in it for quite some time. I had been awhile since I had been able to clean myself and have a towel to dry off with after. I had become so used to air drying that I found myself squeegeeing the water off my body with my hands before I got out of the tub. I was now full, refreshed, and ready for bed.