Las Fallas

Just a quick post to tell you about my little trip I went on yesterday to Valencia - Las Fallas.

It was pretty crazy. Las Fallas are basically these huge model things and each one is meant to depict a different daily Spanish life and for the 5 day festival they are erected all over the city for you to wander around and look at them as well as taking in the Valencian culture eating paella and soaking up the sun. There are a few drawbacks in this as I personally couldn't see what any of them depicted, don't like rice and it was freezing but ..never mind.. life must go on and they were nice to look at, very detailed and they must take months and months to make, although some were very strange and of children.. You'll see why this is worrying..


On the last day and night, which is when we went, they have a big display of fireworks.. at 2pm.. yes thats in the afternoon. Consequently you can't see them, just hear the bangs and smell the smoke, very strange, but this is Spain.. anything goes..

The highlight of the whole week, and Jay i know you are gonna love this-- is the burning of the fallas, all of them, bearing in mind these things are absolutely massive, easily as big as the apartment blocks next to them, it's quite an achievement that they don't burn the city down. They set them alight by wrapping loads of bangers around them and then setting loads of fireworks off at the bases of each statue thing. The statues are made of cardboard so they burn easily, the fires are so huge and pretty spectacular, plus the fact its done at night so it has more of an effect than the fireworks in the daylight. The Spanish people love it - they whoop and cheer everytime they set fire to them and they fall down. I thought it had a kind of pagan feeling about it.. I'm sure there were no regulations either. I'd seen Spanish people wandering around with scarves on their heads all day, it did make me wonder, it wasn't until we had bits of burning cardboard land on our heads that I realised why..

Another aspect of the festival (another one for you J), is locals letting off fireworks in the street all day every day. There is a definite element of danger in this I feel, especially as a favourite game of the locals is to throw firecrackers at foreigners. The firecrackers are movement sensitive so if you try and run away it follows you and burns your leg. We had someone throw a banger at us from a fourth floor window... I was quite scared for my life.
The whole affair is very noisy, it sounds like there are bombs going off all around, not good for pregnant women or those of a sensitive disposition I'm sure, although I did see quite a few dogs and cats and they didn't seem to mind too much, I guess they must be used to it.

The day was quite knackering all in all as we had to leave Madrid at 8am and then arrived back at the same time this morning. It didn't help that we had a load of crazy Italians on our coach who sang very loud Italian songs all the way there. They got pissed before we even left Madrid. Unfortunately I didn't manage to sample of the legendary agua de valencia.. a delicious cocktail made of champagne, orange juice and a variety of spirits as i had some dodgy paella that made me feel a bit queasy. I knew rice was evil..

All in all though it was a pretty fun day, not sure if i would go back again though, the fact I left valencia alive the one time is a miracle I think, and I'm not sure I got the whole point of daytime fireworks and burning foreigners though I spose with Americans it's a fair game ..