San Fermin

Wow. really wow. Biggest party in a city I have ever seen. It was ridiculous! but absolutely fun.

Tony and I arrived, with no number for Felipe our host and no directions to his house, it was right when the mayor spoke to say hoorah lets party for a week and everyone starts spraying calimochos and sangria everywhere. So we were a little nervous of what was going to happen, especially because it took us an hour to finally find an internet cafe. Once we did we get his number, gave him a call and worked our way to plaza de castillo where everyone was hanging out getting wasted. Tony and I went to a touristy stand and bought some white pants and shirts, we had to fit in and not look like the typical Americans. Everyone, and I mean everyone is in white pants and tshirt with a red sash around the waist and a red bandana around the neck. All day and night you drink calimochos and sangria, which are like 7% alcohol. Tony drank one 1.5Liter sangria and was drunk, and they cost 3.5 euro, so you can imagine how the night went.
Felipe said he planned to stay up all night so we could go watch the running of the bulls that was at 8am. I was scared as Tony and I only had 5 hours of sleep from the night before and we started drinking at 1pm.
People are insane during this festival. They´ll stand on this one statue thingy thats 20feet up? and 10 people will stand below them linking arms to catch them as they jump to their fate. It was aweome, well kinda sad but the first dude we saw they barely caught him so he clonked his head a little and was pretty messed up for a while. But everyone else after that was caught. Girls were being retarded and going up there flashing guys and jumping, it was gnarly.

It was really fun though, apparently the city goes from 150,0000 people (i believe is what felipe said) to 1 million. Just ridiculous amount of tourists. He said everyone here is really calm and don´t party much during the year, their whole mindset is San Fermin and as soon as one san fermin ends they are thinking of the next one.

Anyways so Tony and I split up from the group for a bit and wandered around for 3 hours alone. We went to a lot of bars to dance for a bit. Searched for the best drunk food we could find, which we didn´t succeed very well at. Finally at like 2 am I couldn´t handle much more, the night got really cold and I was exhausted. So we were going to find a bench to sleep for a few hours but luckily after an hour we got ahold of Felipe again and he was actually back at home to sleep himself. Yay! So we got a lot of sleep, didn´t go to the running this morning as we would have had to get up at like 630 am but we are looking into getting tickets for the bull fight tonight and tomorrow morning we will go to the running. Felipe our host is going to run, as well as another cser here so tony is going to check out the scene, if it feels right he´ll do it. Only 9 people got hurt today :). But he won´t do it without knowing whats going on.

I´ll try to put some pics up later of everything from last night. Just absoulutely insane, imagine NY on New years times ten. The town is an awesome town, except during the festival, its soooo dirty as thousands sleep on streets, there aren´t many bathrooms so its taken to the streets, you just throw your trash on the ground. Very dirty but they have workers out trying to clean up as best as possible. Anyways, if you can´t tell we are enjoying San Fermin a lot, especially if we get to see a bull fight tonight!

Angie will you please have Carter, I keep having dreams about it and making bets with myself that it happened and check and no carter, so hurry up!!! :)