Pascua Toro

What better way to celebrate Easter than to chase a bull through town? Not sure, because this is what I did today. This is one of the biggest events of the week, everyone has been talking about it in anticipation. Today started early with saying goodbye to my housemates as they left for the airport at 6am. It was back to bed for a few hours before heading to the plaza for the day. While we were sleeping Courtney arrived to the house. She will be here for just a week and left a note on the dining room table to wake her up before we left for the plaza. Boy was she thrown into the deep end of Ayacucho craziness. We had gotten very strict instructions from Rudy on what to do today. He told us, "you must get to the plaza by 10am, buy your Pascua Toro shirts, then find a place to wait until the bulls come. After the bulls have run you will need enough money for 3 beers, then go home for lunch and rest then come back to the plaza to dance and party in the plaza until the sun goes down. " We followed his advice and set out to buy our shirts first thing then found a spot to wait for the bulls. The bulls were run from the Mirador, a look out of the city high on a hill, where a cattle sale was happening across the city to the opposite end of the city. There were 2 men on horses riding in front of the bull warning the crowd that the bull was coming and one who was pulling the bull on a rope. As the bull ran through the plaza madness broke out as people were yelling TORO! and pushing and shoving to either get closer to the bull or farther away from it, all at the same time. I had great intentions of running with the bulls but after seeing the madness of the first bull I quickly determined that the bull was not the dangerous part of the activity but getting trampled in the stampede of people were more likely to cause bodily injury. It took a lot of time in between each bull coming through the plaza and we passed the time by dancing in the streets, drinking beer and screaming for the firefighters to spay the water our way to try and beat the heat from the blaring sun at 11am! After Rudy assured us that the 4th bull was the last bull to come through I felt brave enough to go the center of the street and really join the party. We met some new friends from Lima and were dancing the morning away when all of a sudden a 5th bull came out of nowhere! I ended up being pretty close to the bull which turned out to be good because it was the only time we got good pictures of the bull. One of our new Lima friends did not move out of the way as fast as the cowboys would have liked and got whipped. Ouch! After a few more hours of dancing in the streets we called it a morning and headed home for lunch and siesta.