Never fear, I'm still here! Last week, but I honestly didn't do anything but study for my midterms. It was quite an exciting time for me and I figured y'all wouldn't have been interested in studying with me. My big highlight of last week [which seriously feels like eons ago] was going to another cooking class. This time, we made tapas! I learned how to make patatas bravas [yummy fried potatoes with a spicy sauce], croquetas [fried ham dumplings], tigres [basically mussel croquetas], and a type of gazpacho that I can't remember the name of. They were really yummy and pretty easy to make!
This past week, I had two midterms on Thursday and then I left for Las Fallas de Valencia. Las Fallas is a huge festival in Valencia that is always between the 12 and 19 of March. It is the second largest festival in the world, with the first being Carnaval in Rio. Before I go into deets, let me just say, Las Fallas was absolutely amazing and so much fun. If you're ever in Spain during that time, its a must do!
So, what exactly is Las Fallas? I'm glad you asked! Basically a falla is a float made out of paper mache and wood. Each section of the city creates their own falla; typically they are a satirical representation of some aspect of society. Along with the fallas there are also falleros and falleras. Falleros(as) are people of all ages dressed up in historical Spanish clothing who participate in processions throughout the city. The dresses that the girls wear are absolutely gorgeous. Each day fireworks are set off at 2:00 PM and 1:00 AM, and along with these people are setting off firecrackers pretty much all day long. On the last day, the judges pick the winner of all the fallas, and a piece of the falla is saved and put into a museum while the rest of it and the other fallas are burned.
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| Typircal Fallera dress |
Now, onto the deets! We left for Valencia on Friday night after class and we took the Ave [the high-speed train]. It was so awesome, the seats were really comfortable and it's just generally very easy to use. Really random Madrid thing: the Atocha train station has turtles in it. Not like 3 or 4, like 100-200 random turtles in a little habitat in the middle of the train station. It's kind of really weird and really really random. Anyways, we got to Valencia and trekked our way to our hotel/hostel. Unfortunately because we booked it so late, it was pretty far from the city center so we had to take a cab to go into the city. But other than that, it was really nice. After finally making it to our hostel, we just grabbed some tapas and dinner and crashed for the night.
Saturday morning, we got up and headed into the center. We had no idea where exactly we were going or what to expect, all we had was a map that was missing about 85 percent of the street names and street signs that were in Valencian instead of Spanish, so that was an adventure! But we managed to navigate to the Plaza de Ayuntamiento where the first set of fireworks were [the ones at 2:00 PM]. There were tons and tons of people in the plaza, it was crazy! They shot off so many fireworks in the middle of the square that the smoke blocked out the sun [and not to mention, made all of us go a little deaf for a bit]!
Kind of long, but all the fireworks in Plaza de Ayuntamiento
After that we pretty much just wandered the streets and looked at all the different fallas in the city; we really only saw a small handful of them [there were 380 total, I think]. My favorite one was apple themed so it had a whole bunch of famous apple stories, like Adam & Eve, Snow White, Johnny Appleseed...and Steve Jobs.
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| Adam, Eve, and Steve Jobs? |
It was really cool to see all the different ones, they were all so creative! We grabbed lunch at a paella place because Valencia is super famous for paella. We sat outside, which was nice because we got to watch all the falleros parade by in their costumes. After wandering around a bit more and munching on some delicious, freshly made churros we made our way to the fireworks. The fireworks at night were phenomenal. It was 20 minutes of explosions and craziness. I've never seen a more impressive fireworks display, and they only get bigger the further into the festival you get.
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| Noms, street churros! |
On Sunday, we walked along the beach for a bit and I can say I've been in the Mediterranean Sea!
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| Me and the Mediterranean |
Before heading back to the city center, we went to the museum districts and went to the Fallas museum. It's really cool because they have pieces from all of the winning fallas since like 1934 or something like that. There are also these really cool vintage posters that were used to advertise the festival. After that, we pretty much just wandered through the city in the parts we didn't go to on Saturday. The big part of the festival on Sunday was the procession. Over the next 2 days all of the falleros have to walk around all 380 fallas. It was so cool to see all of the different dresses and listen to all of the music.
Life lesson learned: If a police officer tells you the parade is passing through at 3:30, it really means the parade is taking over the city at 3:30. My friend and I figured if we gave ourselves an hour to get to the bus station, it would be fine. Oh how wrong we were, the parade was everywhere. We were pretty much boxed in and we couldn't get through the main plaza because of the crowds. We ended up cutting through all these side streets with our not-so-helpful map and we had to run through the parade a couple of times. I'm proud to say that we made across half of the city in 20 minutes and made it perfectly on time for the bus back to Madrid. The bus back was awesome! It was an express bus, so it had these really big, comfy leather seats. I was able to stretch out a bit and got to watch The Avengers in Spanish on my individual TV. It was awesome, I'm definitely splurging the couple extra euro to take one of those buses again.
Overall, Las Fallas was amazing and I will gladly go back anytime. Maybe next time I'll actually get to see the fallas burn! Going to the Fallas really made me realize just how young of a country the US is. The earliest recorded mention of the Fallas was in 1784, its likely that the Fallas has been going on long before that as well. It really made me appreciate all of the history and traditions that I'm able to be a part of here because back home, we really don't have any huge festivals like these. Next time I go to Las Fallas, I'm definitely going to stay through the end so I can see them burned.
Random side note before I go: Most Spaniards cannot say/spell my name. In the past month and a half, I've been called: Kalasey, Calsey, Kalsie, Casey, Cassie, Katrina, Carsi and [my personal favorite] Clausi. Yes, Clausi, I'm still trying to figure out how they got that one [I even spelled my name for them!]. It's always really entertaining to see what my name ends up as!
That's all I've got for now, I might be a little late in updating the next few weeks; lots of traveling coming up [From now until the end of April/beginning of May, I'm only going to be in Madrid for one weekend]!
Besos,
Kelsey
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