As for fun stuff - there's been a lot of it recently, fortunately! La Mercè was pretty incredible. I've never seen an entire city participate in a festival so whole-heartedly for a whole week. Also, large-scale public events just seem to work better here than in U.S. cities. Maybe it's because everyone really wants them to go smoothly. I was so impressed when we had read in a guide that they were giving out free bread and chocolate at this museum, and then when we showed up, they actually were! What's more, everyone was being perfectly calm and civil about it - there were no lines (amazing!), pushing or shoving. You just walked up to a table, took your bread and chocolate, and enjoyed it. Lovely. A similar experience happened when I was wandering around the Parc de la Ciutadella, where there were all sorts of stalls and booths and stages set up, as well as troops of people dressed up like giraffes or giant ants playing instruments and walking around:
Inside a formal garden next to the Parlament de Catalunya, there were tons of really comfortable folding lawn chairs set up for people to sit in, while lovely guitar music played. Once again, I was amazed at how calmly people reacted to this. It felt very dreamlike, actually, in the sense that I found myself thinking, "Of course - why shouldn't I sit for a while in these chairs, listen to the music, watch the clouds, then move on and let someone else sit here?" Here's a picture:
Absolutely the most incredible thing I saw during the Mercè, though, was the correfoc. It's hard to describe, but I'll do my best. Correfoc literally means "fire run"; basically it was a huge parade through the old city consisting of teams of people from different neighborhoods and sometimes large beasts they had made out of paper mache (I think) holding excessive amounts of really big sparklers, usually set up on rotating poles so that, when lit, they whirled around in circles and sprayed a lot of sparks all over everyone watching. The people in the parade were ususally dressed up as devils, with long capes and head-coverings and fireproof gloves, as they were literally in the middle of exploding fireworks. I have never seen so many explosions up so close - it was crazy but so much fun, and everyone around me was so excited and into it. At the beginning, an announcer up on a platform next to me told a story in Catalan that I could mostly follow about some legendary creature that had always been associated with the correfoc but was forbidden by Franco, so some knights (interesting mix of medieval legend and recent history) went to rescue it and freed it from its chains, at which point it vowed to always protect Catalan culture and traditions. All of this was acted out, with lots of fireworks as well. At the end, as a sort of invocation, he said something like, now the festival will begin, "amb foc, la millora manera d'expresar la nostra joia!" ("with fire, the best way to express our joy!"). I loved it. I felt so proud to be able to understand and cheer along when he addressed us as "Barcelonins i Barcelonines!"
Here's the mythical creature whose name I'm not sure of:
OK, I need to get to bed! Hope that's given you a snapshot of what's going on here. I'll try to write more regularly - that will make it easier to keep up with everything, anyway!
Somriures,
Sarah
2 comments:
P.S. that last comment was actually from me. KT
WOW. Continue to have an incredible experience!!
DAD
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