Celebrating in Barcelona!

Weekend of Sept. 26-27)

To get up to date here (almost), last weekend was a holiday, La Merce- the Catholic holiday of Our Lady of Mercy. That's all I know, from Wikipedia. They have all kinds of crazy celebrations for this stuff.

First thing we did was go see fireworks. But fireworks of a different kind. They have a kind of pseudo parade, with drummers and people dressed up as devils with firecrackers on pitchforks that spin around and POP when they're done. Movie of that later also. So we got as close as we could and ducked down so we didn't get showered with sparks. It was pretty cool. And crazy loud.

The next morning we went to see people stacking competitions. Yeah I thought they were just gonna do pyramids like this...

And turns out they started making towers as well. This is two layers of people high...

Three layers of people...

Four layers...

Five layers of people...

Six layers of people!

which got up to seven and then the outside peeled away to show the stack of people inside, that was just one person on top of the other- they needed the outside tower to support the inside while they built it. HOW did they not fall.

Group number two trying to build their tower, three layers high...

four layers high...

7-8 people high, with little kids on the sides making their way to the top, wearing helmets.

Team pink gives it a go.

This was just the first round. The second round, the tower involved two people face-to-face on each level. That started collapsing. There were kids on the top. We saw people fall 20-30 feet as the tower started crumbling, and one kid from the top when head over heels, bouncing off the tower on the way down, falling into the crowd, like a rag doll. Truly alarming. And everyone just clapped when they all fell down, as if it was part of the show. No one reacted. I couldn't believe it.

That night, I skipped out when I should have been building that model, and we went to see real fireworks. TOTALLY WORTH IT. There were hundreds of thousands of people there, on this boulevard of government buildings, with a giant water fountain at the end that has its own sound and light shows, that it did along with the fireworks, and they had loud music piped out all over, in time to the fireworks. Classical music, Spanish music, movie soundtracks, you name it. 45 minutes of fireworks. Incredible.