I think I still have a headache from the "fallas" in Valencia on Thursday (or perhaps it's from tequila?). After a basically sleepless (but fun) night in the airport and a short flight we arrived in Valencia at 8 am Thursday. We successfully navigated the metro and took off down a random street in Valencia (the 3rd largest city in Spain) and arrived at our hotel a half hour later. We're good. We left our backpacks in the luggage room and took off on a bus to the center where all the fun was, and on the way saw the fallas everywhere. A falla is basically a giant styrofoam sculpture that's painted and cartoon-like. When I was picturing this celebration I was thinking maybe about 20 fallas in the city. WRONG. I talked to the man next to me on the bus and there were over 300 ones made by adult teams and another 300 or so by youth teams (these fallas are somewhat smaller).
The noise
The whole day everyone in the city is setting off fireworks, even though it's daylight. Even small children run around lighting them, I'm serious. As we were walking to our hotel we commented on how we felt like we were in a country that was in the middle of a war. It was ridiculous. That went on all the way through the night. At 2 pm Thursday there was supposed to be this huge parade that everyone said would be amazing. The crowd was so tight it took us 20 to 30 minutes just to walk a block over an hour before the parade started. For the parade, imagine 4th of July during the day. Every now and then the dark colors showed up. It was still cool to experience, it just didn't quite meet my expectations. After that we returned to our hotel, checked in, slept, skipped the next parade, ate supper, then headed down the street to watch a nearby falla burn.
The burning of the falla:
The official schedule said that all fallas burn at midnight except the winner which burns at 12:30. That was a lie. They must've meant that in general the burning of the fallas start at 12:00. We arrived at a big viking with a woman on his shoulder and lots of little styrofoam people surrounding him around 11:45 pm. At 1:40 there was a pyro-technic standing near me so I asked him how long until they were going to burn it. 2 am. And that was the planned time. So at this point we had been there for 2 hours and we REALLY wanted to see that burn so we thought another 20 minutes would be nothing. Well, it officially began burning at 3:27 am. THREE HOURS WAITING FOR IT TO BURN! And it was worth it. They hammer holes into the falla about half way up to aid in the burning, and then cover the bottom parts in gasoline or lighter fluid. Then they wrap a string of fireworks around it and light them and it all just goes into a big ball of fire. The firefighters stand there hosing down the apartment buildings around it so they don't burst into flames as well. It's quite a sight.
The rest of the weekend:
We slept in until 11:30 Friday and then headed to Cortes Ingles to get a picnic lunch and on to the beach for the rest of the day. For the remainder of the weekend we ate peanut butter, fake nutella, and banana sandwiches. It was cheap. Friday night we played cards, watched Atonement in Spanish along with a British version of SNL whose sole point is to "compare" the Brits with Americans. As an American viewer I did not find it entertaining, but watched it anyways. Saturday was another relaxing day. Kendra and I walked around, shopped, soaked up the sun from the park in the city of arts and science while the other 2 girls enjoyed the science museums (they're both bio majors). Then when it hit 5:00 we began our tequila sunrise adventures along with more cards and sandwiches and crazy tv shows (this time in German). I'm assuming this is the reason for my headache today. We made it back to Segovia around 7:30 this evening and now I'm just headed home for supper, a shower, and homework.
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