Fallas = loud; burning; drunk people; candy; fun; macletas, which are basically fireworks; and large objects in the middle of the streets! You wouldn't believe how loud Spanish people can be, and how long they are loud...basically we were woken up every morning this week by the desperta (wake-up call) which sounded like bombs going off next to my house. Then all the small kids would run out into the streets and throw petardos (firecrackers) and eat candy alllllll day until around 12:00am when the younger ones would head off to bed and the older ones would come out and hang out in the streets until about 4:00am when they would finally stop putting the firecrackers into the trash cans to make them louder and go to bed themselves! The Fallas themselves are works of art. Some of the larger ones were 5 stories tall, and in Valencia they were even taller!!! Fallas are a form of satire created to critique some aspect of the Spanish govt, entertainment or whatever has happened in the last year. So what happens is groups of people get together and work on these Fallas all year and then put them up in the streets of Denia for the past week and a half.
On the day of San Jose they have the crema (burning), which starts at 9 for the children's fallas and 12am for the big Fallas! So obviously since we have heard all the firecrackers and seen the mascletas this week we had to go watch the Fallas burn!!! Beginning at 8:30 with the last huge mascleta we proceeded to literally run back and forth through Denia in order to see the most cremas possible! It was so much fun! We ended up right in the front for a lot of them. The Falleras light the fuse to the Falla, there is a firework show and then they start it on fire!!
Something you should also know is that the policia are not quite as concernd for our saftey over here. The police line was only several hundred feet away from the huge burning fallas, so if (and this happened several times) it got too hot and you started to burn or if burning pieces of ash began to float down on your head, all we did was back up a bit!! :P It was rather dangerous, but super fun!!! Have no fear, none of us actually got burned, we just ended up with black ashy faces! As you can see in this next picture they were really really big fires too!!!
Sevilla vs Valencia
Now that you are sick of reading I'm going to talk about Sunday! I traveled to Valencia on Sunday with 4 others from our group to see a professional futbol game!!!! It was Sevilla vs. Valencia in the Mestalla stadium. We got cheap tickets for the nose-bleed section (literally we were in the last row alllll the way on the top!!!) It was a fantastic day for a game! As a result of one of the members of our group having lived in Sevilla for several years we were there to cheer on Sevilla. It is a good thing to, because they needed supporters!! I know there had to be other people in that stadium for Sevilla, but we could not find them.When Sevilla scored it sounded like we were the only people in the stadium cheering....which is probably very close to being true. (I'm not sure we were very liked in that stadium!)
All in all it was a great weekend...although I didn't get a whole lot of sleep I will be making up for that with the siesta, one of the best parts of the day, and going to bed relatively early this week!
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