Welcome to the wonderful world of stacking. Sunday afternoon was the Mati Casteller, or Human Castles Morning. I think it says something about the culture here that the Human Castles Morning began at about 1pm.
Sorry to drag this weekend on. I'm not a huge fan of my own writing and so I tend to avoid it if I can. Back to La Merce (the festival this was all a part of), on Sunday we were pretty excited to have a chance to see "stacking", as Andrew and I call it. This involves a huge group of people pushing against each other and getting as close as they can to form a base for the rest of the group to create human towers on. You can't tell from this photo, but the layer just below where the photo cuts off consists of a group two or three times the size of that bottom group you can see. I'm sure there about a hundred people in each stacking group.
We're not exactly sure if this is a competitive sport or just something to do. What we do know is that there are different formations that they try and we've seen them get as high as nine layers, if you count each of the little kids on top as a layer. The biggest and brawniest guys are in the second layer and then the people get smaller as you go up until at the very end one or two little kids wearing some frighteningly inadequate helmets shimmy up everyone to the top. As soon as they get up there they raise their hand and then start shimmying down everyone. The whole tower collapses by people crawling down each other until they're done. From what we've heard, stacking is something unique to Catalonia. No one else in Spain seems to be willing to put their smallest children atop a rather shaky tower of people about 40 ft high.
Later that night Andrew and I walked around the city and caught a few more concerts. The biggest one was a group from the UK called Travis which we'd first heard while we were in Cambridge. Apparently thousands of other people had heard them too because it was crowded enough to make even the most sane person quite claustrophobic.
2 comments:
Personally, I find stuffing a large amount of individuals inside a telephone booth to be more interesting.
Oh, oh. I guess I shouldn't have mentioned a "telephone booth". That really dates me, doesn't it?
Love, Dad
Well, you and all of Europe which still proudly display their telephone booths on the streets everywhere. England even paints them bright red so you can't miss those marvels of modern technology.
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