Ansó, 26 September
by Isabel Isherwood - 14:36 on 26 September 2016
The morning after the night before…… The end of the Fiestas. Five days of gaiety and drinking and music and streets packed with locals, visitors and those for whom Ansó is still ‘mi pueblo’ but who have moved away to live in Zaragoza or Madrid. Today it is like a ghost town, the only sound is the plastic rattle of bunting flapping over the empty streets.
Yesterday we were home from San Sebastian in time to see the vaquillas: bullocks (not full grown bulls like in Pamplona) were let loose on the streets and young men – and older men too, trying to relive their youth - tried to antagonise them sufficiently that the animals would run at them, whereupon they could demonstrate their skills in fence-leaping, dodging or simply running away very fast….. Nobody was hurt ‘severly’, so that was all fine…..
The atmosphere was exciting and if you push away the tendency to empathise with the bull it is fun – but I kept finding myself thinking about levels of stress hormones; Jake would have quite liked a go but hadn’t really recovered sufficiently from the triathlon - and the girls were horrified by the idea; Iona was convinced something terrible was going to happen to Rowan and had to go home to calm down; Rowan alternated between sympathy for the bullocks and wild excitement. She loves a spectacle and there was plenty of that!
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