Trier - View south from Black Gate
Okay... After way too much testing (note the time), I think I not only got this working (in both Internet Explorer and Firefox--no clue if it works on Mac browsers or not), but got the HTML to validate, too! That was much harder than it might sound. I finally found a page about using Java applets with the XHTML object tag. What a pain.
Now that you're probably dizzy from watching the panorama below spin around, you should know that you can click and drag in the panorama to move it yourself. This is the amphitheater at Trier. Enjoy. I'm going to bed.
Trier - Amphitheater
Hello again! I finished up stitching a couple more panoramas over the weekend, and wanted to share them. The first two are from a trip I took about a month ago to Trier, and the third one is of the Kurhaus in Wiesbaden (referenced in the Main sights section of the Wiesbaden Wikipedia article). The ones in Trier were taken with my old lens, and the one of the Kurhaus is actually three rows worth (opposed to the usual one row) of pictures taken with my new lens.
Trier - View south from Black Gate
Trier - View west from Black Gate
Wiesbaden - Kurhaus and moon
I'm still working on putting together a 360 degree shot of an ancient amphitheater in Trier. I'm experimenting with a couple of Java applets that will allow you to view just a section of it at a time in the web browser, and use the mouse to scroll around in it. Should be pretty cool once I figure out how to make it work. ;)
Ok. I'm off to bed. See ya.
Wow. Over a month without a post. Is anyone still out there? Probably not. Oh well. I'll keep writing anyway. So, what have I been up to in lieu of writing? Lots of things, actually. I'll start with my trip to Amsterdam.
On Friday October 10, Adam and Ben and I hopped into my car and got on the road towards Amsterdam. We left in the afternoon after work, and got to the city around 9:00 pm (after one stop and a couple of traffic jams). Turns out you can cover quite a bit of ground when you're driving 110 mph. ;) We drove to our hotel in Rembrandt Square, dropped our stuff off, and drove outside the city and parked the car at a train/lightrail station, and took the train back into the middle of town. (You can actually see our hotel, the Hotel Atlanta, in the background of the "Rembrandtplein at night" picture on the Wikipedia article on Rembrandplein.)
The first night we didn't do much. Just ate some dinner and then went to bed. We woke up on Saturday, and decided to take a "free" walking tour of the city. I put free in quotation marks because the tours aren't really free. There is a company called Sandemans that organizes tour guides in several major European cities. The tour guides are paid in tips from the tourees (is that a word??) at the end of the tour, based on how well you think they did giving the tour. The tour was about four hours, with a short stop to grab a snack and sit down for a while. The tour included (straight from their web site):
We found out from our tour guide, John, that he would be giving that evening's red light district tour. We liked him as a tour guide, so we decided to go on the tour. That was... interesting. We had walked through the area during the day, but he purposely left out most of the area because they of course wanted us to come back and take the non-free tour. It wasn't too expensive--only 10 euro. I'll just say that there is quite a booming business going on in the red light district. There are lots of shiny things, most of which are quite... distracting. There's a little bit of something for everyone, and it was fun to window shop. At the end of the tour, the whole group went to a bar to hang out for a while. After drinking a Coke and trying to make conversation (and failing due to the loud music), I went back to the hotel and went to bed around midnight. Adam and Ben made it back about 3:30 am, and told me to wake them up after I was done with the shower in the morning.
I woke up about 9:00 am, took a quick shower, and pulled their butts out of bed. ;) We had a busy day ahead of us! Sunday was museum day for us. After eating "breakfast" (in quotes because it was noon by the time we ate) at the Pancake Bakery, we went to the Anne Frank house. In case you don't recognize the name, not that I would expect anyone not to, Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who lived in hiding in Amsterdam with her family during World War II. She kept a fairly detailed diary, which her father Otto Frank (the only one of eight people in hiding in the house to survive the concentration camps) had published after the end of the War. The house, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., was a very sobering experience. It was really a very well done museum. There were a lot of interesting things to read in the first couple of floors of the house, and we actually got to walk through the entire hiding place. It's one thing to read about the group's experiences. It's quite another to actually take a step through the hole in the wall that was concealed with a bookcase, and walk around in the area that they were hiding in. Although the hiding place was much bigger than I had imagined it, it is still pretty amazing that eight people managed to hide in such a small area.
Here is a picture of me in front of the house:
After the Anne Frank House, we stopped by the hotel for a few minutes, and then headed for the Van Gogh Museum. It turns out that Vincent van Gogh was Dutch. Who knew? Not me. It also turns out that Vincent Van Gogh is not really my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the museum, and had a good time looking at all the artwork. But, I enjoy paintings that are a little more realistic. I was also a little disappointed that one of his most famous paintings, The Starry Night, is on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So we didn't even get to see that one. (I may have seen it when I was at the Met--I honestly don't remember.)
After the Van Gogh Museum, we went and ate dinner. When we finished, it was about 8:15 pm, and Adam and Ben were planning on going to a pub crawl sponsored by the same tour company we had used the day before. So, I went back to the hotel, grabbed my camera equipment, and went out to take a couple of panoramas. This was the first real opportunity I'd had to take some panoramas, because the tour progressed fast enough that I didn't have time to set up my equipment, and the museums didn't even allow photography inside.
A brief aside... at the very end of September (the 29th, to be exact), I ordered a new lens. To be specific, it's the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L lens. It is a tilt/shift lens, that allows me to take multiple-row panoramas without needing extra fancy panorama equipment. It also will allow me to take pictures of buildings and keep them in proportion. And, it allows for some pretty cool tricks with the focal plane. I was hoping the lens would arrive before we left on our trip. I checked my mail on Thursday night, and didn't find anything. I left work a few minutes early to go and check my mail again, right before leaving on the trip, and lo and behold, it had arrived! So, I was somewhat eager to get it out and figure out how to use it.
I only ended up taking two panoramas that night. One was of the 3D version of Rembrandt's "Night Watch". The other was of the Stopera, which is a building that houses both the city hall and the principal opera house of Amsterdam. Here they are:
Amsterdam - Night Watch
Amsterdam - Stopera
Also, here is a panorama I took handheld while we were on the tour. It is of the Begijnhof, which was somewhat-hidden inner court that had a church in it. (The church was behind me when I took the pictures.)
Amsterdam - Begijnhof
Adam and Ben came in at 3:30 am again. I woke up the next morning in time to get everyone out of bed, take showers, and get checked out of the hotel on time (11:00 am). We took the lightrail back to the car after stopping at a cafe to get cappuccinos. Which reminds me... I forgot to mention the "coffeeshops" of Amsterdam. Coffeeshop is the name used for a place where you can go to buy and smoke marijuana. They are all over the city. The stench is quite obvious as you walk by them. The tour guide warned that if you want a cup of coffee, go to a cafe, not a coffeeshop.
Once we got back to the car, we headed for a town on the coast to get some brunch. After our meal, we got on the road, and made it back home around 8:00 pm on Monday night. All in all, a pretty fun trip. I found out that there is also a free tour in Madrid, so we will probably end up doing that when we go over Veterans Day weekend.
Other things I've been up to... And this is gonna be quick because I want to go to bed... ;) I recently started playing racquetball somewhat regularly. I had never played racquetball before this month. It was not difficult to learn, but it will be difficult to master. There is actually quite a bit of strategy involved, and I'm not good yet at strategizing and running to get to the ball at the same time. I also sprained (or maybe just "hurt") my ankle last week while playing, so I didn't play for almost a week to give it some time to recover. I must say, playing racquetball is probably the second most fun I've had while exercising. (First place goes to sand volleyball.)
I have also, of course, been playing video games pretty regularly. I'm trying to get my kill-to-death ratio in Call of Duty 4 up to 1.0. I'm currently at .95. So close! I've also been playing Rock Band 2, and a little bit of Rock Band. I still have 12 songs to go to finish drums on Expert on Rock Band. Unfortunately, I've been taking a bit of a hiatus since breaking a drumstick. :( I failed a song several times in a row, and stood up from the drum kit to go in the kitchen and get a drink. For some reason, I took the drumsticks with me. Bad idea. In a moment of frustration, I smacked the drumstick against my table, and it cracked in half. Oops. Instead of buying new drumsticks, I'm planning to get a whole new Rock Band 2 drum kit, because my yellow drum pad has cracked in a couple of places underneath the rubber. And, the Rock Band 2 drum set is supposed to be much quieter, has a metal-reinforced pedal, has expansion ports to add cymbals, and is wireless. Wow. I just read that sentence back. I'm a dork. :)
The other "major" thing I've done recently is (finally) watch the Planet Earth documentary. I bought the set on HD-DVD quite a while ago, and just got around to watching it. I had a problem playing disc 3, and after trying numerous reboots of my Xbox and cleaning the disc (to include boiling it for a few seconds as suggested in a few Internet forums), I looked down at the disc and realized that it said Blu-ray on it. Apparently the HD-DVD line and Blu-ray line are right next to each other at the factory, and something or someone messed up on my set. Fortunately I have a PlayStation 3. I popped the disc into it and it played just fine. The series itself was quite amazing. All of the video looks spectacular (I think I would watch a video of paint drying if it was in high definition), and the cinematography is really good as well. I think the most impressive shots were great white sharks breaching clear out of the ocean to catch seals. Amazing.
Oh yeah... I almost forgot... I bought a Wii last week, too. I haven't even opened the box yet. Too much other stuff going on. Soon...
Ok. Hopefully the length of this post made up for the lack of posts this month. I have one more panorama that I'm putting the finishing touches on that I'll try and get posted later this week. But no promises. ;)
Wow. What a day! I had a great time at Photokina, and got some very surprising news.
We made it to Köln around 1115, got our tickets squared away, and started walking through a couple of exhibits, trying to find some food. We ate a quick lunch, and then got started looking for the booths of a couple of camera bag vendors that Seth wanted to check out. We quickly realized that this convention was huge! There were 10 gigantic halls, and most of them (if not all) had two floors. We found the Mountainsmith and Lowepro booths, and Seth physically inspected a few of the bags he had been looking at online. Then we made our way over to one of the halls that was focused on image processing.
A brief aside... The software that I use to stitch all my panoramas together is called Autopano Pro, made by a French company called Kolor. Back at the end of July, I got an email from the company saying that they were going to be producing a book of panoramas, and were soliciting Autopano Pro users to submit their images for consideration for the book. I figured what the heck, why not submit a few? So, I submitted 10 pictures just before the submission deadline, which was at the end of August. A couple weeks later, they put an update on their website saying that they received 1600 (!) total submissions for the book from more than 240 Autopano Pro users. They said that each contributor would have at least one panorama published in the book, and that they had selected 360 images total. (You can read about it on the Autopano blog.) When I read that I thought "Well, that's cool. I'll have a panorama printed in a book." At least that's what I thought until this afternoon...
I had read on the Autopano blog that Kolor was going to have a booth at Photokina, so today I looked up where it was and walked over to it. As I walked up, I saw that they had a big poster up advertising the book. "Cool!" I thought. "Maybe people will actually buy the book." The poster had quite a few smallish (probably 8" wide by 2" tall) panoramas on it. I glanced at them. Cool stuff. Hey. Wait a second. That one looks awfully familiar. Hey! I took that one! I literally had seen the picture for about 2 seconds when I turned on a dime and went to grab my friends.
"You guys aren't going to believe this. I submitted a few panoramas for a book that Kolor is making, and they used one of mine in the poster that's advertising the book at their booth!!" We all went back to the Kolor booth, where I showed them the picture that I had taken. While we were standing there, one of the Kolor employees walked over and tried to hand me a CD, saying that it was a copy of the program that would work as a trial. I told him I already had the software, pointed at the picture like a proud father, and said "I took that picture." The employee said "Oh! That means it will be in the book. Congratulations!" I then proceeded to make Seth take a picture of me pointing at my panorama.
The deal was, according to the contract, any picture you submitted to them for consideration for the book could be used by the company for promotional purposes. They weren't allowed to sell it directly, other than in the book, but they could use it in company advertising, promotional materials, etc. I also got to retain all rights to the pictures, so I can still print and sell them all I want. Apparently they had liked my panorama well enough that they had decided to actually exercise their right to use it in promotional material!
At that point, I started to look at the rest of the thumbnails. Hey. Wait a second. That one looks awfully familiar. Hey! I took that one, too!! Two! They had not only picked two of my pictures (at least) to be in the book, but they had used both of them on the promotional poster! Wowzer! I had to call my friends back over. While we were standing there, another Kolor employee came over and tried to tell us that they had discounts on the software if we bought it at Photokina. I proceeded to tell this employee that I already had the software, and that I had taken two of the pictures on the poster. She asked which ones, and I pointed them out to her.
Here are the two pictures that they had on the poster:
Belgium - Bruges - Building facades
Spain - Bilbao - Guggenheim from across the river
I made Seth take another picture of me, this time pointing to both of the panoramas. They were less than a foot from each other on the poster. I had been so excited about the first one, that I had completely missed the second one. One of the Kolor employees grabbed a camera and took a picture of me pointing at my panoramas. He came over and started talking with me about the book, and I asked him what his job was at Kolor. Turned out he was one of the two guys who had developed it! So, I chatted with him for a few minutes about the software, then shook his hand and went on my (extremely) merry way.
The rest of the day was fun, too. I like photography equipment. All in all, we did quite a lot of walking, and made it to quite a few booths. Here's a list of the ones I can easily remember off the top of my head:
We walked by more booths than I can count, but those are the ones that we probably spent the majority of our time in. We spent an extra long time at the Nikon and Canon booths, because they had lenses out for people to use that all of us have only dreamt of buying. We had fun playing with them.
Well, that pretty much sums up my day. I'm now very excited for the panorama book to come out. It will be cool to see a couple of my images in a commercial publication. I'll leave you with a picture of me pointing at my panoramas on the poster at the Kolor booth.
I finally feel like I'm in the right timezone.... almost. I still am not getting tired as early in the evening as I should. For example, right now, it's 11:00 pm, and I'm up typing this instead of getting ready for bed. Oh well.
On Sunday night, Adam and Ben came over so that we could plan a couple trips. We ended up booking tickets on Lufthansa for a trip to Madrid, Spain over Veterans Day weekend (November 7-11, actually) and a trip to Bristol, England from December 4-9. Also, I think Adam and I are going to go to Vienna, Austria for Thanksgiving, since neither of us have plans to go home. And, the three of us also just decided that we're going to go to Amsterdam, Netherlands for the Columbus Day weekend.
That's a lot of trips! It's going to be Christmas before I know it. So, I'll finally get out to take some more pictures (it's been a while since I was on a good photo trip), get some more panoramas stitched, and post them to the site.
I'm heading to Photokina tomorrow, so I need to get some decent sleep. And now I'm actually starting to get a little tired. :)
Wow. It's been almost a month since my last post. I guess that's what happens when I go on back-to-back trips. It was great to spend 10 days in Maryland and see all of my friends and pseudo-family that I hadn't seen in months.
By far, the best part of the trip was getting to see people that I hadn't seen, or in a couple of cases even talked to, for several months. The second best part was probably the food. I ate at Chipotle three times, Panera four times, Papa John's twice, Five Guys and Chick-Fil-A once each, as well as an Indian place and a Thai place that I used to go to a lot. Yay for food. I also had some good-ol' leftover beans at Randy and Mary's place. Thanks Mary!
I also got to spend an afternoon playing volleyball, which was great. Quite a few of the old summer beach volleyball crew made it out, and we played in the disgusting Maryland weather for a couple hours. I was drenched from drizzle by the time we stopped.
Rock Band (the game) also played fairly big into my Maryland trip. I actually had two separate invites to Rock Band parties that were being held at the same time! I am officially giving myself the title of "Maryland's Most In Demand Virtual Musician For The Month Of September 2008." I played Rock Band (with friends, of course) on three of the ten nights I was there. Technically, one of those nights was spent playing Rock Band 2, which came out on Sunday the 14th. The new no-fail mode is cool, especially when you sit a two-year-old down at the drums and put them on Expert difficulty. I have also spent several of my evenings since returning to Germany playing Rock Band 2, but have hardly made a dent in the 75-song main setlist that the game had. It will take me a while to beat the game.
So what have I done since I got back to Germany on Tuesday morning? Not much. It took me a while to adjust back to the 6-hour time difference. Actually, since I woke up at 1100 this morning, I'm not even sure I've adjusted. I made it into work at a reasonable time every day, but I pretty much felt like crap the first couple of days back. I've discovered that traveling west, I can adjust to up to a 9-hour time difference (Germany to California) in a single day. Traveling east, so far I've been able to force myself to adjust to the new time zone (going to work, eating, etc.), but I feel kind of "off" the first couple of days. It's more than just feeling tired. Everything just feels kind of strange for the first couple of days. Almost like I've traveled into the future somehow. ;)
This weekend is designated a "catch up on life" weekend. I finally unpacked (!), have two loads of laundry going right now, caught up on entering my purchases into Quicken (boy did I have a stack of receipts from MD), and have plans to go grocery shopping (it's been about a month and a half since I really went grocery shopping) and clean up my desk tomorrow. Also, since I got new luggage at Costco while I was in MD, I will be throwing out my old beat up luggage and making some extra room available. (The new luggage actually nests properly since I bought it as a set, as opposed to the hodgepodge single-unit stuff I had before.)
Hmmm.... what else did I want to write? I think that pretty much covers the last three or so weeks of my life. Pretty exciting. (Not.) I haven't taken many pictures for a while, mostly because I haven't done much touristy travel recently. I plan on taking a day off of work and going to Photokina 2008 this next week. Photokina is a huge (probably the biggest) photography trade show held every two years in Köln, Germany. Not only will I probably take some pictures of the city while I'm up there, but the show will probably re-excite me about taking pictures. Not that I'm not excited... just busy doing other stuff recently.
Hello! It's been a while since I wrote anything. I've been busy at work, and just haven't felt like doing anything of value by the time I get home. (For the record, watching movies and TV and playing video games are not "of value.") Of the non-valued things I've done recently, the most significant thing is probably the fact that I finished watching So You Think You Can Dance Season 4. And it was only about two weeks after the actual end of the season! I still need to catch up on Scrubs and Lost. And, I just recently started watching Metalocalypse, which is quite entertaining.
Wiesbaden had a wine fest that lasted from August 8-17. Someone threw a barbecue on the first weekend, and someone threw a birthday party for their now-two-year-old on the second weekend. I went to both of the parties, but didn't spend a whole lot of time down at the wine fest. Being a non-drinker really cuts down on the excitement of a festival based around drinking. ;)
On Friday (the 22nd), we had our summer work picnic. There was a baseball game, and several people had pies thrown in their faces. There was bidding to see who would be the lucky winners of the pies in the face. You could bid on making someone else have to get hit with the pie. The top 5 and the bottom 3 people on the bidding scale were the ones who got the pies. And, at the actual picnic, there was more bidding to decide who got to throw the pie at the person's face. It was pretty messy.
I played in the baseball game, and woke up sore this morning. :( Then a friend called and asked if I wanted to go to the driving range to hit some golf balls. I figured that would be a good way to relieve some of the soreness, so I met him and his wife and kid at the range at 1230. I hadn't swung a golf club in a couple of years, and was surprised that I was actually able to hit the ball somewhat consistently. I think I might try and get in a round of golf before I leave on another trip on Wednesday.
Ok, I'm gonna go work off the soreness by watching a movie. ;) So, I will leave you with a few random panoramas from some of my earlier trips (all the way back to January!) that I have gone back and stitched together. Enjoy!
Austria - Alpendorf - Top of gondola
Austria - Alpendorf - Top of mountain
Austria - St. Veit - Church
Belgium - Bruges - Building facades
Italy - Verona - City and stadium
Hey all. Sorry I haven't posted in a while. The current score is "Life 4,382,236, Jason 2." I suck at Life. Anywho... I have managed to stitch together the panoramas I took on my Spain trip. They're below in chronological order. I hope to have another post by the end of the week with the rest of the details of the trip.
Bilbao - Guggenheim front
Bilbao - View from bridge near Guggenheim
Bilbao - Guggenheim from across the river
Bilbao - Guggenheim from across the river - Cropped
Bilbao - Guggenheim from bridge
San Sebastian - Beach
San Sebastian - Coastline
San Sebastian - Bay 1
San Sebastian - Bay 2
My trip was delayed for a couple of days, so I had a chance to finish all of the Switzerland panoramas. Here they are, in the order I took them:
Lake Geneva
Täsch - Town
Täsch - View from hotel
Klein Matterhorn - View north
Klein Matterhorn - View north and east
Klein Matterhorn - View north from further down the mountain
Totensee - Group sitting
Iseltwald - Dock
Iseltwald - View from room
Iseltwald - View from room - Opposite shore
And there you have it. They could still use some work (tweaking colors, etc.), but that will have to wait until some other day (just like the rest of my post about Spain, and all the panoramas I took there). I'll be gone for a couple weeks, so don't expect any new posts until the end of the month. See ya!
I'm back from Spain, and have successfully survived the Running of the Bulls! The trip actually started out as a disaster, thanks to the very first U.S. Airways flight that my friend Ken was on. He was flying Baltimore->Philadelphia->Frankfurt->Bilbao. Unfortunately, the Baltimore to Philadelphia flight left late, causing him to miss his scheduled flight to Frankfurt. Fortunately, they were able to put him on standby for a later Lufthansa flight, which he was able to make. Unfortunately, that flight left late, too, which made him miss the flight we were supposed to be on together from Frankfurt to Bilbao. (Have you noticed the pattern yet?) Fortunately, they were able to get him on the next flight to Bilbao. Unfortunately, it left 5 hours later than the first one, so I got to sit in the Bilbao airport for 5 hours waiting for him. I would have gone to try and check in at the hotel, but the reservation was in his name, so I decided to just sit around. Well... I didn't just sit around. I walked around the whole airport, played with some pictures on my laptop, ate some ice cream, and actually typed this paragraph. ;) I also bought a map of Bilbao and found out where our hotel was. Oh yeah... and I thought a lot about how crazy I was to even be thinking of running with angry, horned, half-ton bovines on a narrow street crowded with hundreds of people. But more on that later (mostly due to the fact that at the time I'm writing this, I haven't done it yet).
After Ken showed up, we caught a taxi to the hotel, and walked around Bilbao to get to know the city. We ended up eating dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall place that basically had a bar and about six chairs. It was decent food, and pretty cheap. We also tried to figure out how we were going to get to Pamplona. We discovered that trains didn't go there, and that we would have to take a bus. Finding the bus station proved to be tougher than expected, though. We kept asking people where it was, and they would say "Salma Mes." Or so we thought. We found out later they had been saying "San Mames," which is the plaza that the bus station is at. We stopped to watch a little street festival show that had a lot of potential, but turned out to be really lame. The only cool part was when they poured lighter fluid on the cobblestone plaza and lit it on fire.
On Thursday, we got a quick breakfast at a little bakery right next to our hotel. I had something called a "bollo de mantequilla" (literally "ball of butter"), which was basically a roll with butter in the middle of it. Pretty tasty. After breakfast, we headed to the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim was... well... uh... interesting? It was pretty much entirely modern art, which is not really my style. I can appreciate some of it, but a lot of it is lost on me. Probably the coolest thing was a large (and I mean large collection of installation art by Richard Serra. They were basically giant sheets of metal in interesting shapes. It was art that you could walk through. Another cool exhibit was a big room with five or six floor-to-ceiling columns of LEDs that had words scrolling up or down them. The effect was actually somewhat dizzying if you just stared at the words and not at the walls of the room. We ate lunch at the Guggenheim, did a little shopping at the store, and ended up leaving around 3:00 pm.
After the Guggenheim, we walked around the city a little more, and then went to meet Ben, Nam, and Noel (three co-workers of mine who were also going to the running). We met them at their hotel, and then went off in search of dinner. It was a long search. We finally found a place at the corner of a big plaza, and we all got paella. After dinner, we went to catch the night's festival show that was in the same place as the one Ken and I had watched the night before. This one was much more entertaining, mostly due to the fact that it had fireworks. I like shiny things. We figured out how and when to meet up again the next morning, and then went our separate ways to sleep.
Friday morning, Ken and I woke up and started walking to the hotel that Ben, Nam, and Noel were staying at. We stopped at a bakery along the way to get breakfast. After we met up with the other guys, we all took the electric train thingee over to the bus station, and caught a bus to Pamplona. It was a two hour ride. Once we got to Pamplona, we got checked in to the one hotel room we had (for everyone), and then went to the downtown area to walk the running route.
I had seen several videos of the bulls running, but actually seeing the street where it takes place was quite an experience. I think it was after first seeing the street that I started to get more nervous. I consider myself to be a pretty rational person. That said, running with bulls is almost as far as you can get from rational. (Jumping out of a plane with no parachute would be a little farther away from rational, for those keeping score at home.) So why did I, a rational person, want to run with bulls? The answer: nothing. There is no answer. I have no idea what would make me think that running with bulls would be fun. And I had been nervous about it. But now I was even more nervous. Ken and I had planned to watch the running on one day, to get a feel for how everything worked, and then actually do the run the next day. We had also heard that you shouldn't run on the weekend, but if you were going to run on the weekend then Sunday was the better day. So the plan was to watch on Saturday, and run on Sunday, at least for me and Ken. Ben, Nam, and Noel were planning to run on Saturday. Things didn't go according to plan. At all.
First of all, I realized that if I watched first, up close and in person, I may not end up running at all. Most of you are probably thinking (especially you, Mom), "Yeah, you should have done that!" Well, that's not what happened. Ken and I decided to run with the other guys on Saturday. So, we woke up at 5:00 am, got dressed in our traditional bull running outfits (white pants, white shirt, red sash around the waist, red neckerchief), and headed for the bus. We ended up getting to the spot that we wanted to start the run from about an hour and a half before the bulls were to be released at 8:00. That spot was just after Mercederes Corner, which is widely considered the most dangerous point in the run. Basically, the bulls have to make a 90-degree right turn, and they usually slip and fall going into it and can come up a little confused. So yeah... a ways down the road from that point seemed like a good place to start. What we didn't realize, however, was that the police sweep everybody off of the course downstream of the main church plaza at 7:30, and that's when plans really started to change.
The police basically formed a line across the entire street, and just started moving forward. Everyone was forced to exit the course. We were all squished together, and at this point everyone else (I found out later) managed to squirm through on the left side of the crowd and make it ahead of the sardines, to get a little breathing room. I was not so lucky. I was a sardine for a few more seconds, and then realized that all my friends were gone. I wasn't sure if they were in front of me or behind me, but I assumed in front, so I managed to squeeze through the crowd and out of the sardine can into the normal flow, and spent the next several minutes trying to a) figure out where everyone had gone, and b) figure out where to go to make it back onto the course.
I eventually figured out that to get back onto the course you just had to get to the right spot and crawl through the two wooden fences that protect onlookers from the bulls. After doing this, I ended up in the main plaza by the church, with a whole lot of people. Too many people, in fact. I tried as hard as I could to squeeze through and get back to Mercederes Corner, to make sure I wouldn't be there when the bulls caught me. I couldn't make it. There were just too many people in the way. This is when I had a bit of luck, however. I ended up completely squished next to a group of Brits, and I asked them what was going on. They had heard that there was a gate up ahead, keeping people from moving further down the route. They said it would open up at the start of the run. I could actually see the Corner up ahead, and estimated that, depending on the crowd around me, I could be past that spot by the time the bulls caught me. My backup plan, was if the crowd didn't move enough at the beginning of the run, I would just force my way about five feet to the right and crawl through/over the fence. And then the gate opened up, at about 7:45, 15 minutes before the first rocket would signal the opening of the bullpen.
People started to flood out of the plaza and towards the Corner. The crowd thinned out a whole lot, and I told the group of Brits that I was going to try and meet up with my friends, and wished them luck. I went back to the same spot where we had been standing before. A few seconds later, Noel tapped me on the shoulder. He had also been separated from the group when he stopped to use the bathroom after the police had started clearing the route. We moved a little further down the route, and waited for the rocket. 8:00 rolled around, at least on my watch, and nothing happened. There were a few people sort of walking/trotting down the route at this point. And then we heard a little pop in the distance. Not too many more people started moving, and we started walking along the route, on the right side of the street. And then we heard the rocket.
This was much louder than the little pop we had heard before. This let you know it was time to get your ass moving. We picked up the pace a bit, to a medium jog. And then we heard the second rocket. (The first rocket means the gate has been opened, and the second rocket means that all the bulls (and the steers accompanying them) have left the pen and are heading your direction--quickly.) That was when we started to run. Well, as quickly as you can run when you're trying to look both forward and backward at the same time and slalom through people who had decided not to start running yet, while getting pushed or nudged occasionally by people running past you or people that you're passing. Noel ended up making much better time than me, and pulled off ahead. But I wasn't worried about him. I was worried about me.
Things here are a little fuzzy in my memory, but I'll do my best to describe them. First of all, I started to hear people get excited. I'm not sure how you can hear that when people are already yelling, but somehow I did. Second, I started to hear the little tinkly sound of a bell rapidly approaching me. And then someone in front of me tripped. I slowed down to avoid stepping on them. I would have tried to jump over them, but there were people on the other side, giving me nowhere to jump to. I ended up squished against the wall by several people. And then the bulls ran past. I can only remember seeing about three or four. There are actually twelve that run each day. I don't know if I had some form of tunnel vision, or if they were packed together just right so that I only actually saw the ones on the end of the line, or what happened exactly, but it happened very fast. Before I knew it, all the bulls were past me. I jogged down the street a little more and hopped through the fence just past the store that my friend and I had agreed to meet at. And then some more steers came by. I had no idea there was going to be another group of steers released later. Apparently they release to pick up any straggler bulls that may have gotten separate from the herd. After the steers went by, the fences started getting disassembled by the city employees, and I went to the store to meet up with my friends.
...Well, that covers the most exciting part of the trip. I am really tired right now, so I will have to finish this tomorrow, if I get a chance. My next trip was postponed until Wednesday, so hopefully I will be able to get another post done tomorrow and put up some pictures. Until then...
