Flamenco!

I guess party season is starting again. This time the Spaniards celebrated flamenco. I had read about a festival called Feria de Abril and a couple weekends ago Andrew surprised me by taking me there. As far as I could tell from what I read, some people got together a couple decades ago and decided to petition the city to have a four day festival. There wasn't anything in particular to celebrate, but they were Spaniards so reasons for celebrating weren't high on the agenda. Planning and having a party was. The festival was actually started somewhere outside of Barcelona but the Catalans decided to run with it anyways and turn it into an eight day event instead of a measly four.

The idea with this party is that groups from all over put together a flamenco performance and host it inside a tent. There were probably 30 giant tents each with a stage, seating and tables for several people, and lots of food and alcohol. The festival was free to get into and then you could choose a tent to eat at and watch or join in the dancing. It was actually really fun to walk around and see all these women dressed up in their flamenco dresses with big combs and fake roses in their hair. We got there about 10pm, which is when the party was just starting. The tents weren't really filled until about 11pm or so, and then everyone was eating and dancing away no matter their age or bedtime. Sometimes while a dancing group performed on the stage, men and women would get up and dance on the floor if the mood struck. Other times the tent owners would just play music while people ate and some people danced, not bothering with a performing group.

Outside of the tent area, there was a carnival with some of the scariest rides Andrew and I have seen. They just don't seem to worry too much about safety here. One ride consisted of a platform with several padded benches on it that were made up to look like mechanical bulls. When the ride started, the platform would gyrate and shake as much as possible, knocking people off the benches. Nobody was strapped in. There wasn't much to hang on to. And the padding didn't look too abundant either. Shoes were actually flying off the riders and into the crowd watching. But that was nothing compared to the ride with two giant metal cages on each end of a giant seesaw-ish thing. People would stand in the cages and then the cages would swing back and forth, almost going upside down. Not an unusual ride until you think about the fact that those people were just standing in the cages, no padding, no being strapped in, just metal bars to hold on to, and then they were swung 20-30 feet in the air. I guess most people there are too drunk to care about whether or not they might get seriosuly injured on the rides so the carnival thrives.

There were also stands selling artisinal foods and spices, and let's not forget the churros. We decided to keep it milder than our last forray into carnival churro food and so I ordered a piece of cake and Andrew tried to get just a few churros. Andrew doesn't like cake here because he says it's always dry so I chose a piece of the moistest looking cake I could find. There were about four layers of what looked like chocolate cake and then some filling. Unfortunately, the layers I thought were cake turned out to be buttercream frosting and the little bit that I thought was the filling turned out to be the cake. We each had about two bites before gagging and throwing the thing away. 4 euros! (6 dollars!)

Andrew was making fun of me for spending so much on some really bad cake so we went to get him his churros. The last time he ordered churros he didn't know how much to order so he got a half a kilo or something. It ended up being way too much and we debated whether or not it was kind of us to give the uneaten churros to a homeless man. We decided all that grease would probably cause him more harm than good without the use of his own private bathroom, so we didn't pass them on to anyone. This time Andrew decided to just try getting 200 grams of churros, hoping that would mean about 4 or 5 churros. It turned out to be pretty much like the same amount he got last time, minus one or two. I think between the two of us we ate about ten of them and that was only about half of what Andrew got. It was really all the deep-fried dough sprinkled with sugar that we could handle, but hah! it was 4 euros, so I got to make fun of Andrew for wasting 4 euros on a way-too-rich-to-eat dessert too.

We took the picture of the candy for Michelle. Just tell us which flavours you want, and we'll try to bring some to you.