Our office is having an underwear drive. Yes...you read that correctly. They're collecting underwear for kids or something. I don't know why I find this hilarious but IT IS! There are big boxes that are partially filled with bras and underwear all over the place. I learned the hard way that they're only accepting NEW underwear.....
I heard this morning that an american got gored at Pamplona's running of the bulls yesterday. (I heard this because I turn to the FoxNews Channel while I'm taking the 9 minute snooze after my 0530 wake up alarm.) I went to the running of the bulls one summer with my friend Stacy in either 1989 or 1990. Based on my experience, you really have to TRY to get gored because innocently running or standing near where the bulls run is not nearly enough. These guys hit the bulls with newspapers and run around screaming and yelling trying to get the bulls to charge at them. I feel nothing for the idiot who got gored.
First a little about Stacy. She is a very old friend. It seems weird to call her an Army friend but that's exactly what she is. We were in Germany together (I was her sponsor), we traveled to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day (a whole other story probably coming down the pipeline soon) and to Spain. One of my favorite times with Stacy involved going out to this Club called "The Dorian Gray" at the Frankfurt
Airport the day before we were going to a Rolling Stones concert. This club had different rooms with completely different themes and music in them. There was the Salsa room with raucous salsa music playing, the techno room (where a bunch of German sprockets barely danced) and the normal rock-n-roll/top 40 room where most people migrated. In that main top 40 room Stacy and I were conspicuous because we actually enjoyed the music and danced. You see...Germans don't really dance (they think it's not cool) and they just sort of slightly bend their knees or sway very slightly to indicate dancing. Americans like me and Stacy jump up and down and dance with our arms flinging all around. We really stood out. While getting a drink (American dancing can be exhausting), MICK JAGGER walked in the club. I was shocked and froze but Stacy yelled "MICK JAGGER" and propelled herself toward him only to be quickly deflected by one of his enormous body guards. She safely bounced back onto me but I was very proud of her for her quick reactive skills. I was also very impressed with the body guards. By the way, Mick looked like walking death back then (in the late 80s).
Stacy and I drove to Pamplona, Spain from Frankfurt, Germany. We were both in the Army at the time and both military intelligence officers. She was working at a signals intelligence battalion, however, and I picked her up after work for our grand week-long adventure. I thought I was really clever and tried to take a short cut over some type of ramp behind her unit building and ripped the muffler off my car. It was an old 1978 Mercedes that I bought for $1500. Ripping that muffler off the car was not doing it any favors. So...we spent the first few hours of our "vacation" trying to re-attach the muffler to my car. With a couple of wire hangers and some duct tape, we sort of affixed it and were off. We drove south and through France and realized that there are about a million toll roads between there and Pamplona. We barely had enough cash to make it. Also, at rest stops I would have to crawl back under the car to make sure that the muffler was still hanging in there. Oh yeah...my seats were faux fur covered. It was a pretty sweet ride!
We sputtered over the Pyrenees and finally made it to Pamplona and parked near a park. We were starving and neither of us spoke Spanish. I could speak German and a little French....not great languages for that part of the world.... We had also been unable to find an available hotel room (this town was packed to the gills). We rode on this huge ferris wheel and drank little bottles of amaretto that Stacy had brought with her. We still needed food. We walked around to several loud bars which served tapas and tried to buy drinks. What usually happened was that the bar was so crowded that we were unable to get a drink but we did eat some of the tapas. There were serving it everywhere...sort of a Spanish happy hour. We ate and ate until people started noticing that these two homeless-looking girls were eating all of their tapas...then we left and found another place to eat. The week before, my relatively new boyfriend (Dan) had embarked on a two-week train trip through Europe (which he had planned before we started dating) and he was planning on meeting us in Pamplona. We went by the train station several times looking for him. (This was before the dawn of cell phones.) No Dan to be found. (There were a lot of heroin addicts to be found, however....yeesh.) Stacy and I gave up and decided to go to the street with the bulls run. The night before the running the streets are full of people drinking. The deal is that you drink all night (through the night) and run early in the morning. Then you take a nap and, in the afternoon, start drinking for the next full night and morning run...and so on and so on. There are several bars along the bulls' route. Some had video replays of that morning's action and stills of the gorings (if any). Stacy and I met some Kiwis (not the bird or the fruit or the shoe polish but New Zealanders) who were on their walkabout. Now...young Aussies and Kiwis save up their money and go traveling at least once in their life. When they do this, they like to drink A LOT. I recommend finding any of these people when you're on vacation and hanging with them. They're definitely where the party's at! These guys were drinking sangria (ole) and monument diving. This was a deal where you climbed up a monument and dived into the crowd (hoping that someone would catch you). It's sort of like stage diving at a rock concert. Stacy and I had both had quite a lot to drink by this time, both tried it....and survived. We met a bunch of totally hilarious people and finally were so exhausted that we both had to get some rest. (We couldn't rally and pull the all-nighter.) We went back to my car (which had already had the Mercedes symbol cut off its hood) and pulled out our Army sleeping bags and slept in the adjacent park.
The next morning we woke up and were starving. We went to this little diner-type restaurant and sat down on this long table with benches on either side. Neither of us could read the menu very well so we just pointed to something that someone else had ordered and gave hand gestures indicating that we wanted two of those. (By the way, I would never felt such a language barrier again until I went to Edinburgh.) This very old, skinny, little man was sitting next to Stacy and his very VERY fat wife was sitting next on his other side. When our food came, this guy reached over and started cutting Stacy's eggs for her and fixing her tea. We both just watched and Stacy thanked him. Weird. The fat wife glared at us. We quickly ate, paid and left.
We went back to the train station and were sitting on a bench next to some bum who had a newspaper over his head. We started talking and the newspaper moved. Dan had slept on the bench that night. (Yes...Dan and I were a very classy couple.) Yippee! We found him. What should we do? Oh....hmmmm......go drinking of course! We drank all night and slept in the park again that night. I unfortunately got a little queasy during the night and had to get up and vomit. I wandered over to what looked like a garbage area and threw up on a pile of newspapers only to have the newspapers move after I'd hurled. There was someone under there! I high-tailed it out of there. (Ahhh....the life of a homeless drunk bum....I can't say I haven't experienced all levels of life....) The next morning we got up and went to where they were running with the bulls. These guys were wasted! They were mostly wearing the traditional white shirts and pants with the red scarves around their necks but there were a bunch of westerners who were wearing shorts and t-shirts. Corral-type fencing had been erected all along the route which led to Hemingway Stadium. Really. We sat on the fencing and watched these fools run at the frightened bulls and hit them with newspapers to try to get them to charge. (And people wonder why Spain isn't a world power anymore....) Sometimes the bulls would charge (and then the guys would run away screaming) but mostly the bulls just wanted to get the heck out of there. We followed the route down to the stadium where people ran all over the ring while bulls were charging at the confusion. Guys were trying to get the bull to charge so that they could flip themselves over the bull's horns. So weird.
So.....in sum I feel NOTHING for any idiot would get themselves gored by a bull. They really have to be asking for it because the bulls don't want anything to do with these nuts who keep hitting them in the head with a newspaper.
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