Saturday the 23rd was the Huamantlada, or the running of the bulls in Huamantla, Tlaxcala (same place with the night that no one sleeps, but a little different theme). We arrived early to find the streets packed with people and barricades. The general format for the day was to find a seat on one of the ply wood bleachers (you pay whoever owns that property to sit there) that had been constructed around the city (see photo below) and then wait for the bulls.
There were actually 3 separate closed circuits in the downtown of Huamantla, each with 8 bulls. While people were still finding places to sit or stand, the bulls were delivered in cages by a forklift to their different locations. So instead of a running of the bulls, like
So after sounding a couple warning fireworks, the course was cleared and the bulls were released from their boxes. After that, there was a lot of waiting when the bulls were in different parts of the course and then excitement as the bulls faced those brave enough (or drunk enough) to be down on the actual course.
The big excitement of the day, other than the bulls ramming themselves directly into our plywood barrier, was the bull that got loose. We were sitting right in front of the red cross area where they can remove the injured. This is good for the injured (in total there were 19, but luckily no one died this year….2 did last year), but bad for one of the bulls. One headed directly for the corner and after 3 head butts, broke through the wood barrier and was loose in the city center of Huamantla. The guy sitting next to me was giving us live coverage of the bull’s path since his son was watching the event live on tv. Eventually the police shot and killed the bull (5 years ago one got out and killed a woman before it was shot). While the bull was loose we were all kinda stuck in our seats since the other bulls were still loose, but everyone was chasing the loose bull. Things eventually returned to “normal” and the event ended with each bull being lassoed and returned to its box.
