As part of rigs non-presents for this week, our third bullcast of the Fair.
Since y’all aren’t running, I recomend buying your chocolate with churros already and eating it while you watch. Hmmm, chocolate for breakfast! I don’t care what doctors say, there is no way that can be bad for health.
This year Caja Navarra (the local bank, owned by the Navarrese Government and therefore a bit by each of us Navarrese) has made its ads by getting people of different origins and colors to sing two traditional songs. One is the prayer I told you about; the other is the chorus in the Vals de Astráin, aka el Riau-Riau. When other people hear “waltz,” they usually think Blue Danube… a Navarrese is highly likely to think Astráin instead. We’re weird that way. The people in the ads are a white guy who sounds like he’s “from Pamplona his whole life,” a black guy (methinks he’s not from Hawaii), a south-American woman, another white guy who sounds American and two guys who look and sound like Japanese tourists (or maybe Korean or Hongkonese).
The interviews today are mostly with people from outside town; several Americans who come every year… a group of people in their 40s from Albacete (S Spain) who is there for the first time and say they’ll come back… a young guy who, when asked if the bedcover he was sleeping in was his grandma’s said “yes, I brought it all the way from Santiago de Chile, Grandma’s Navarrese!” They’re also showing bulls-in-the-street fiestas from other places, some of them inspired by ours.
A San Fermín venimos
por ser nuestro patrón
nos guíe en el encierro
dándonos su bendición.
It’s sung three times, with several minutes silence and nerves in between. The run starts at 8:00am sharp, usually - on Saturday it went late because of the problems with the fence and with cleaning.
After the fence is set and the streets are clean, the town’s major and a small cohort walk all the path, nominally verifying that fence and streets look ok. Of course they don’t start walking until things are set, and if they start late and get to the bullring late, the run starts late.
The oxen are all ahead of the bulls, one of the bulls couldn’t find the gate and hit one of its sides. The veterinarian will have to take a look at that one, maybe there’s something wrong with his eyes (could have been just more nervous than others).
By the end of Sto Domingo, they’re already in the usual setup, with three oxen in front, then the bulls, then the other three oxen. I haven’t seen any falls at the bend, it’s pretty compact even in Telefónica (by then they’d strung out but there was never more than two bull-lengths between each group and the others). A few fallen guys, but since there’s “nobody” compared with a weekend run, no real problem with that either. Very, very fast run and if there’s any wounded it seems to be scrapes and bandaids. Cool.
Replay at the bend: while none of the bulls had fallen, several guys did; they’d fallen on the inside of the bend, though, and mostly stayed put, so since the bulls invariably slide to the outside no major danger - except for an idiot who was pretty much in the middle of the bend (that is, close to the bulls) and who kept trying to get up. There’s a moment when he’s this >< far from getting a fast apendecectomy, he tries to get up facing a bull but the bull avoids him rather than headbutting. If his mother wants to give the idiot a beating, I volunteer to hold him down.
In Telefónica another guy was seeing a bull (light brown, they’re normally black) on his right and didn’t realize there was another coming from the left… again, the black on the left was more interested in getting someplace safe than in trouble. But this guy wasn’t a moron like the other, just caught in a bad spot. When he notice the left one he didn’t do anything he shouldn’t; didn’t bounce away from him, which would have meant bumping into the one on the right - I see many runners notice a bull when they weren’t expecting one and jump.
They’ve set up some runners with minicams tied to their hips, it’s one of the reruns they do. Today one of these cameramen fell down, we got a closeup of the floor.
Red Cross report: six wounded, all contusions except for one dislocated shoulder. I have no idea why dislocated shoulders are so common. Two of the contusions are head hits, but both were conscious and coherent so it looks like neither is serious.
All those ads for Navarrese food make me hungry. Good thing I already had breakfast! HHmmmmMMMM! Someone has started a Rodizio Brasileño (all-you-can-eat Brasilian BBQ)! Methinks I know where will I invite Mom next time we go to Pamplona 
I did do an ambulance run yesterday, though. One of my country neighbors got hisself into some heat exhaustion, so we hauled him to the horse pistol.