Angry Bulls and Mouthy Broads — Viana, Spain

I shrieked the first time they ran by, right as a young man jumped up onto the fence just before they rushed past him. The other young men scattered up the narrow stone street did the same, dominos jumping up the walls. Somewhere up ahead the bulls were turned around, and they rushed back down the same passage, through the chute of old brick buildings with their balconies and popping geraniums and festival flags and flaking paint and people people people. The young men always jumped out of the way. Some of them ran the whole time in front. Some were more daring than others and stayed on the very edge of danger. I didn't see any women jumping in and out of the fray. 

A boy hangs over the rail, watching the older boys of Viana as they wait for the bulls to come racing back down the street.

I have a video but couldn't figure out how to upload it via iPad. Check my Facebook. 

The bulls poured back into the large ring in the middle of the plaza. Men in bright colors swatted the ground with sticks and hollered, and the herd hurled itself back down the street to run the circuit again. Bells clanging and cheers following all the way, a wave of hoof and sound rolling through stone. 

Brown and black and all muscle, with horns cutting figure eights in the air and hooves scratching out a threat in the dust, they were exactly what I though angry bulls might look like. But then I remembered that these are cows, more accustomed to grass and twitching off flies. And I can tell they're thirsty, and everyone knows they're pissed off and scared, because that was the point of it all. 

It's a little hard to reconcile my fascination with this as an iconic cultural tradition, and my discomfort with it from an animal treatment point of view. 

"I think it's rubbish," said Jess, an Australian woman I met in the albergue an hour later. It's not that she's a vegetarian, Jess said. She's not opposed to people eating animals, but terrorizing them for entertainment was another issue altogether. "In England they outlawed sport hunts ages ago, and that was a cultural tradition as well."

I realized I agreed with her. It's the same way I feel about subsistence hunting versus trophy hunting in Alaska. One I support whole-heartedly, the other makes me physically ill. 

Still, it was something to see. Kids lined every fence, gate, dumpster, or any other surface that could get them high enough to see into the arena. The majority of the people crowding the Viana streets wore white with red scarves, and the smell of tobacco and sizzling food filled every nook and alley. 

This long train of tables was set up for locals to celebrate the fiesta together. The bread and pltes stretched farther than I could see. 

Jess is appalled that I haven't gone out to eat once since arriving in Europe. It's a combination of frugality, language shyness and exhaustion that's kept me on a strict (sad) plan of buying simple food at the market or in vending machines. But tonight, the smells coming from the street are so delicious. Of course, with the festival, it's more crowded than ever and my earlier sight seeing trip had to end when the throngs overwhelmed me. 

But Jess has assured me that we'll be dining together, and it's going to be great. Actually her exact words were:

"Spanish food is amaze-balls. We're going out tonight."

Now we're both on our impractical iPads, across from each other on the second tiers of tonight's THREE-tier bunk beds. We're waiting in our sleeping bags for dinner time to come around in three hours. Earlier, after a French dude suggested we, "Get up, go look around, go for a walk," she quietly suggested to the closing door that he, "Fuck off and mind his own business."

I think I made a friend. 

It's actually harder to get in the second bunk.