So its carnival time here, which sort of reminds me of halloween and the fourth of july mixted together. Oh yeah, there is also horny old women´s day which is better known as ¨Dia de San Blas.¨ This weekend was pretty eventful, considering i was mugged by grandmas, almost hit by a bull, and have slept a totoal of 4 hours in 3 days.

It all started when I went to Ciudad Rodrigo for a saturday field trip to see carnival. For those of you who don´t know, Ciudad Rodrigo is famous for its mini Pamplona-esque running of the bulls, and tons of bull fights and capeas in town. In my school there were tons of warnings that say, ¨No mescla alcol y toros¨ which was good advice for the day to come. We arrived at 9 in the morning, and everybody was drinking in the streets, the clubs were packed, and there were hoards of masked people in the streets. We walked around the small city until we found the plaza mayor. Here they set up a sort of ancient stadium system in the middle of the plaza, where you had to climb ladders and crawl through little tunnels to get to your seat. American safety commisions would shit their pants if they saw this place. we arrived in time for the capeas where a raging bull would enter the ring with about 200 drunk people for a little play run before the actual corridas (bullfight). Here things were pretty funny as you can´t help but laugh when you see some drunk guy get smacked by a running bull, or somebody get trampled by a mob of running drunks. It was something to see. I was packed into the ancient wooden stadium like sardines basically smashing this porr little granny in front of me. It was hard to breath, but the view was worth it. After 4 of these capeas, me and my friend jumped down from our seats down into the ring to escape the unmoving mass of people trying to get down the rickety ladders. We followed the mob of drunks down this tight little alley way that lead to the fields of the town.

We were walking, having a good time, untill i noticed what was going on around us. I saw groups of people stretching, and tieing up undone shoelaces, and more people downing beers and drinks. And we started to realize that we weren´t on the right street. The street was small and narrow but opened up to a wider street with fenced barriers about 20 feet ahead of us. All of a sudden everybody started running. I looked back and i saw the big gates that we just walked through open up, and 5 pissed off bulls came out of that thing. You know that deer in the headlight look of sheer confusion and fear, well thats what i did for what felt like an eternity, I just froze up. Well it was hard to stay still in a situation like that, so I turned around and saw that my friend was already up to the fence. I don´t think i have ever ran that fast in my life. I made it to the opening, and I jumped the fence. The bulls were about 10 feet behind me. My heart was pounding for the rest of the day. I swear it gave me some long term heart damage. But I look back now and it was the funnest moment in my life. I can now say I have ran with the bull, maybe for about 20 feet, but hell, I still ran with 5 pissed off bulls behind me.

I thought the day couldn´t get any more exciting than that, but like usual, I was wrong in my assumptions. We returned to Salamanca around 10 that night. We didn´t want to go back to sleep, so we went to our favorite bar The Eurazmus. On my way back to my apartment, I was walking through the plaza mayor when a group of seemingly harmless old ladies walked up to me and started giving me complements. It was all quite akward, and then they started saying, give us money!!! Da nos dinero!! By that time, they had made a circle around me and there was no way out. Having just come from the bar, I had no money obvioulsy, and thats what I told them. Then they said, ni importa, pero ahora te quite sus pantalones!! = never mind, take off your pants. At first I laughed and said I have to go, but it didn´t do anything to the group of old ladies there. Then to my horror, I saw that they were dead serious. They kept on telling me, you have to do what we say, you have to. So i stood there for a while, I planned to just wait them out, but 15 minutes later they still weren´t leaving. So, I just took off my pants. They looked at me, and then they started passing money around themselves like it was a big bet or something. I´m still really confused on the whole thing. They said ¨ahora tu puedes salir, guapo.¨ And that was it.

I learned that I wasn´t the only one to get abused by the roaming gang of grannies. My friend that same night was tricked into a grope session after taking a sandwich one of the ladies was offering him. He told me he was in the plaza around 3 am and they ambushed him with plates of food. So he took one, they all started laughing and they started to feel him up in a sence. I think he got it worse than me. hahaha

I asked my host mom about this stuff and she told me it was the ¨Dia de San Blas¨ day. It is the one day in the year where the women control everything about everything, (the mayor´s wife is mayor for this day!) and a man cannot refuse a womens request all day long. Unfortunelty, the more modern thinking, younger women don´t really play into this day, leaving all the old grannies to have their one night of drunken fun. So that was my weekend, now i´m going out with some friends to watch the super bowl at midnight (not my idea).
-eric