Beginning of la Merce, 2nd Week of Classes

This past week the big festival in Barcelona started- la Mercé. Last time I wrote I actually had no idea what the festival was about, or why they have it, but now I know that the festival is in honor of their female patron saint, Mercedes. Anyways, it started on Friday night with a parade that led to Plaza Sant Jaume- the plaza in Barri Gotic that houses the Generalitat and important government buildings. They opened the festival with some speeches, all in Catalan, which meant that I could understand maybe every other word. On the way there we also saw some older people in giant circles of 30 or 40 dancing the Sardana, the Catalan folk dance.

They had the "balls de gegants," where guys carry these giant statues that are made to look like old kings and queens, and move around in a sort of a dance. Apparently, they are really heavy, and the guys carrying the giants need to switch out every once in a while. In general, not that exciting. Right in the middle, it started pouring, so we missed the fun part of the opening cermeony(the part that included a ton of confetti). Apparently, its a tradition for it to rain during la Mercé, supposedly because the other saints are upset that Mercedes gets a festival and they don't, so they're crying about it. After dinner, we went to see the fireworks over the beach at Barceloneta. Very pretty, but nothing you couldn't see at home.

Saturday and Sunday were different. There were two things that you definitely would not see at home here. Saturday night was the Correfoc, which means "fire run" in Catalan. Pretty much, you just run around with fire. That's putting it simply though. It's a parade that starts near the Cathedral and winds it way down to the waterfront near Barceloneta for about an hour and a half. The parade has groups of middle/high school kid with drums, alternating with groups of 15 or so people dressed like demons, with their faces painted and carrying pitchforks. The parade starts around 8:30 pm when its already dark, so the demon guys are actually kind of scary.

What makes it crazy is that at the top of the pitchforks a few roman candle-esque fireworks are attached that spin around and spit sparks everywhere. So imagine 10 or 15 guys running, dancing and shouting like crazy people through the street with drums in the background, and carrying the pitchforks above their heads, spraying sparks all over the crowd on purpose, and grabbing people to run with. The fun part is that the crowd is supposed to run the Correfoc, so you get in the middle of the guys with the fireworks, and run with them, yelling and just making noise in general.

Fortunately, my professor told me to wear long sleeves and pants, nothing really flammable, and to have something to cover my head with. I was wearing a couple of layers, with a hood pulled up, a scarf around my face and sunglasses on. I felt silly, but when I got there, everyone else was wearing the same thing. It was ridiculous. At home the city would be sued in 2 seconds, since the demons were all chasing people, aiming the sparks at them, or grabbing people and running with them. I did get a few sparks on my hand, but they only blistered up a little, so they're really not that bad, considering that there were guys running around without shirts. They probably regretted that pretty quick... I took a few 30-seconds long videos and put them on Flickr. Really, take a look at those. It's hard to describe. They're really chaotic, so sorry about that , also once or twice I was too preocuppied with running that I completely forgot I was even taking video. There are also some pictures of my floormates and me with our faces all covered, and of the demons with the pitchforks.

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure where the tradition comes from, because when I went on the web to look it up, I couldn't find anything on it. We asked some random bystander, and he said that in the 1600s, demons were all over Barcelona, so the church called upon the angels to help. The angels drove the demons out, but the demons responded by running with fire on their way out, so every year they reenact it with the correfoc. But he might have made that one up on the spot, who knows. Anyways again that night we ended up in Barceloneta, so we stuck around for the fireworks on the beach with hundreds of other people around us. If you're ever going to visit Barcelona for one day, I'd do it for this one Saturday.

A close second (so far) is the festa de los Castellers. The Castellers are the guys I was talking about who make the giant pyramids of people. Except before I thought the teams were like 40ish, and there were only a few levels of people, but actually the teams are around 400ish, and there were usually 7-10 levels of people. That took place at Plaza Sant Jaume in the middle of the day on Sunday. We were actually really lucky in that on the metro on the way there, we sat right across from this older guy who was wearing the castellers uniform of Vilafranca (one of the best teams, they win a lot of competitions. Yes, there are competitions for this type of thing.)

So Zoe goes up to the guy and talks to him about it, since we both needed to write about it for our spanish classes. He said that the original purpose of building human towers was to scale castle walls in the middle ages, but now it is more of a way for people to get together and work toward a common goal. The casteller teams are familial- there are certain families that have been doing it for like 200 years. The guy said that his family was like that, and now his son is part of the team with him.

We got to the plaza early, which was good, becase me, Zoe and Lindsey are not exactly the tallest people, and we knew that the plaza gets so packed that you're pretty much smushed up against everyone on all sides. For someone my size, that makes it sort of hard to breathe, since you're always getting shouldered and elbowed in the face. Fun. So we were looking around for somewhere to stand, like stairs up to the government buildings or something. Well, there was nothing. But I noticed that a few of the lamposts were big enough to stand on, so we grabbed a random lampost. Unfortunately, that particular lampost have a bunch of policemen around it, and we figured we'd get yelled out, so we moved across the plaza to the only other lampost that was big enough for 3 people to climb on top.

It started getting really crowded about 15 minutes till the beginning, so we all hopped up on top of the lampost. The lamposts were all around the edge of the plaza, so I didn't think we'd be that close to the action, which I assumed to be in the middle of the plaza. I was wrong. Once up on the lampost, I notice a bunch of guys in green uniforms about 10 feet in front of us, a bunch of guys in red about 20 feet to the right, and more guys in purple 10 feet behind the red team. They were making the pyramids right in front of us.

Of course, my camera decided this was going to be a great time to die, so Zoe mostly took the videos i'll be posting, and I borrowed Lindsey's camera a buncha times to take some close ups. Those will be up soon. You should really take a look at them- it's amazing how huge these things were, and especially how intricate the whole process was. Since we were lampost monkeys, we could see from the top how they were setting up the different torres. For example, you'd have 4 guys making a square, then four more guys would stand in the middle, and grab onto each other, and then the whole mob of people would smush up around the outside, and hold onto the guy in front of them. On top of them, they would have another four guys, and another, and another ect, sometimes varying the number of people in each layer.

But really, it's hard to explain, take a look at the videos, at least one of them. One of them should be of one of the torres that fell- it's really scary, especially because you can see the little kids sort of tumbling down, but if you watch, the base is actually pretty good about cushioning the fall and pulling people out of the mess to get them medical care. Again, ridiculous. Take a look at it.

What was great about the castellers was that because we were so close the whole time, we made friends with the green team from Vilafranca. Along with the guy who we met on the metra (who we could see was part of the base, and who was waving at us a lot), the whole team was all making faces at us and talking to us throughout, yelling at us about being monkeys.

That's pretty much been my last 3 days... In other news, University of Barcelona decided to move my geography class to MW, so now I have 4 classes on MW from 9 AM to 9 pm, and I have one class on Tuesday, Thurs and Friday. Nothing like balance. I always signed up for a salsa class at the civic center near one of my friend's apartments. I know that I can pretty much learn salsa whenever and wherever I want, but when am I going to have the time?

When I talked to my advisor here, he said that for the most part, you can't volunteer at a hospital unless you have a formal internship (which i'll do next semester in a lab or hospital), and he also said that the university doesn't really have clubs or activities. Lovely. Well the Red Cross had some student volunteers running around Plaza Catalunya the other day, and when I talked with them they said even though my Spanish isn't perfect, I could probably help out somehow. I'll probably call the Red Cross here pretty soon too to ask about volunteering, once I get an idea of my class load. Also I hope Salva is wrong about that whole no activities at the university thing- I just need to research and see what all is going on.

I've got my first UB geography class in about an hour, so hopefully it will not be as boring as I'm expecting it to be. I'll write about how the class went and the end of the Mercé soon!