Where Does the Time Go

Welp. It's officially been a month since my last blog post. Man, March went by fast. I know I've been slacking, but I have been pretty busy and our spring break in the middle of the month threw a wrench into my schedule. But I typed something up for HSC and I figured I could post that here as well.

            I am now a little over two months in to my stay in Valencia. It’s kind of hard to believe how quickly the time has flown by. I feel as though it was just the other week that I was sleep deprived and stumbling through a Spanish department, listening to this new Spanish woman explain to me where I would be sleeping and eating. Now I have eclipsed the halfway point of the semester and suddenly the end is in sight. I suppose this happens to me every semester, but being in another country for it really puts some things into perspective.

            Valencia just finished up the celebration of Las Fallas and it was quite the spectacle. Every year in the middle of March the city hosts one of the largest festivals you will ever see. Las Fallas originates from prehistoric fire burning festivals that took place around the Mediterranean. In the 18^th century, guilds started forming in Valencia and each of these guilds had their own patron saint. The carpenter’s guild honored San Jose, and they would construct humongous wooden statues and place them in the street. At the conclusion of their celebration of San Jose, they would burn these statues and signify the start of summer. Valencia continues this tradition every year and when the Spaniards party, they party hard.
     There was not a moment to rest during Las Fallas, and even if you wanted to there was slim chance of that happening. Every day at 2pm, the city would set off these delightful bombs called la mascletá. Imagine a fireworks show, but with less emphasis on the fire and more emphasis on trying to knock down buildings. I could hear them from all over the city. I actually went to watch them a few times and while it was impressive, my ears hurt for a while afterwards. In addition to la mascletá, people run around the city at all times of the day with incredibly loud fireworks, setting them off like mad people. And if that was not enough, the daily marching bands parading through the streets were not to be out done. I’m not saying I hated it, but after a month straight of this racket I wasn’t exactly sad to see it go either.

       

This might be a video of a light show. Maybe it didn't actually upload correctly.

            One of the best parts of Las Fallas was the seemingly limitless number of churro and buñuelo stands that packed the streets. They sprouted up overnight and offered these delicious treats for only a euro. A churro is sort of like a donut stick, and a buñuelo is more of a funnel cake in donut form. We had a week off from school during the thick of the celebration, which was March 15^th to 19^th. Before this week, lights had been put up all over the city and the large wooden statues, called fallas or ninots, were hauled out and constructed everywhere. There were over 100 of the statues and they were just plopped in the middle of the street.

One of my favorite ones here. They just blocked off the road and it practically popped up overnight. 

 On the evening of the 19^th, the falleros (people who constructed a ninot) gathered with the fire department and burned them to the ground. It was almost a little sad to watch months of hard work disappear into the night. But that’s the way they do things so I didn’t get too choked up about it. My friends and I would walk around the city to look at them and enjoy the atmosphere. The teachers here told us that the population of Valencia is usually around one million people and during Las Fallas the population swells to two million. There were times where I was standing in such thick crowds I literally couldn’t walk across the street.

This is the same one as above, just engulfed in flame. That bad boy got hot. 

            My favorite part of Las Fallas was the nightly firework shows. These weren’t the jarring bombs of the mascletá, however. I got to see the most incredible fireworks I have ever seen each night at midnight during the four main days of celebration. They would fire them over the río (a former river that has been turned into a park) and it would last for almost a half hour. They lit up the whole sky and were amazing to see. At one point there were fireworks that exploded into smiley faces. Las Fallas was an incredible, exhausting experience that was unlike anything I could have expected. I’m going to have to give some serious thought to returning for another celebration in the future.