Raging Cows at San Fermin

I know I have been remiss in keeping up with this blog.  Most of my writing energy has gone into my professional blog.  But I did finally get around to making a video from clips I collected with Will and Tiffany in Pamplona last summer.

In addition to my proclivity for procrastination, I was genuinely stumped on what kind of movie I wanted to make from my footage.  I wanted to tell a story or at least put the clips into a sequence of acts.  When I thought of a song I could use, the editing went fast.

So, here it is: highlights of the morning Will, Tiffany and I spent watching Spaniards and tourists dodge cows in the Pamplona arena. This cow dodging (my words, not the locals’) follows the running of the bulls and preceded the evening bullfights. You see the bulls finish their run through the arena at the beginning of the video. What follows is a bit of traditional entertainment: throngs of young men avoid a cow mauling in a packed arena.

There is also a high resolution version of this video available for offline viewing.

There are a lot of things worth mentioning about this video:

1. Holding onto the cows’ horns draws severe repercussions from the crowd.  See the example soccer kick to a prone man’s head at 2:15. Of course, that cow took care of itself and needed no assistance.
2. These are cows, not bulls.  The bulls pass through the arena early in the video and are held in pens for the evening fights.  The smaller, much less lethal cows rarely do serious damage.
3. This was a single hour’s worth of fun.  San Fermin runs in Pamplona for over a week every July.  This event can be seen for free every day.

Hope you enjoy watching the highlights as much as we enjoyed watching in live!