Spanish Fiesta!
The Spanish lifestyle (combined with the Spanish heat and lack of AC) has been a real struggle for Jon and me to adjust to. We are trying our best because it is important to us to live authentically in each place we visit and live temporarily. But it’s been hard here! Everything is closed from 2 p.m. until around 6 p.m. give or take, unless the business doesn’t feel like re-opening in the evening. You will be hard-pressed to find a restaurant that is open and serves food anytime before 8 p.m., and the locals will basically never show up to eat at a restaurant until 9 p.m. onwards. Activities, including children’s activities, start after dinner. It’s rare to see children’s activities start earlier than 9:30 p.m., sometimes later. Adult activities (concerts, etc.) often start at 11:30 p.m. or later. Even these will be filled with young children. Our girls have loved the fact that they are rarely in bed before midnight here, sometimes staying up until 1:30 a.m.! They are definitely NOT struggling with the lifestyle here!
Every August, there’s a large fiesta that goes on for a week. Every night there are new fiesta activities. And they have been so much fun! I mentioned the above general lifestyle. True to that, almost all fiesta activities started around 10 p.m., though occasionally they started a bit earlier. We were out almost every night of the fiesta. It was both exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. Some we went and did on our own, some we went with friends from our community here.
I don’t think we’ve ever experienced anything quite like this in Canada. I don’t think you ever could experience anything quite like this in Canada. Much of what makes the fiesta so much fun would never be allowed in our litigious, extreme safety concerned country. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t want to do things that are inherently unsafe. And we didn’t. So, what did we do?
We went out to an event with face painting, balloon animals, inflatables (there was one, in particular, the girls LOVED and did over and over, jumping from one inflatable pillar to the next, trying to get from one platform to the next), and a foam party. I’ve never been to a foam party before, and oh my goodness, it was amazing! We spent over an hour in the foamy bubbles, and I couldn’t count the number of times I needed to wipe the girls’ mouths to get the soap off. I’m sure they probably consumed a fair amount of soapy bubbles that night, but it didn’t seem to bother them! We were all soaking wet and happy as can be when we left. We left just before 11:30 p.m. since I wanted to walk home and shower the girls before going to bed that night. We were some of the first to leave. But apparently, our timing was excellent. They turned cold water hoses on everyone not too long after we left, to hose them down from the bubbles… which does not sound enjoyable to me! I laughingly joked that while they were all soapy, they should try jumping across the inflatable pillar course again, which they were ready to take me up on. But I did not let them go do that… I do have some safety standards!
We went to a flamenco dance show one night, which was a lot of fun. There were kids from probably 6 to 18 there doing flamenco routines. The dancing was beautiful to watch. It kind of reminded me of a more graceful and beautiful version of tap dancing, with a little bit of hula dancing mixed in. I could be completely wrong, but each song and dance seemed like it was telling a story.
We went to the fairgrounds multiple times! The girls loved the rides, especially the bumper cars. I especially liked the kids’ bull-riding one. It was highly amusing to watch for the adults! The bulls would move up and down and rotate side to side, while the kids hung on for dear life. All the rides seemed to go on for close to 10 minutes, so they were at it for quite a while trying to hold on! The carousel also had a teacup they could spin in circles as much as they wanted, though one time Emmeline spun it so fast and so much that Katia almost got sick.
There was lots of amazing food and drinks. There was only one carnival game, though we didn’t do it. The kids got rifles to shoot at a wall of prizes. Anything they hit, they won as a prize. You were only allowed to claim one prize per try, though, so if you hit multiple prizes you had to choose. Prizes ranged from benign fidget toys and stuffies to pretend handguns to real pocket knives to vaping devices, plus a bunch of other items. I really do question their prize choices for a children’s game…
One night was a mass in their beautiful church we had wanted to see inside for a while, followed by a parade. The parade is in honour of their patron saint, Mercedes. They carried out a statue of her, carried by various people because it was so heavy. Regular people joined in to follow along as they walked around town, as well as a marching band and someone lighting off a firecracker or something similar every 30 seconds or so. They walked around the entire town, which took about 1.5 hours. We did not follow along but were there to watch them depart and return.
The final night was some random clown-type show. It was a very odd thing to watch and in our opinion was not a lot of fun. It was a bit interactive, with them throwing balls out at the crowd and the crowd throwing them back. They lit off cannons with paper confetti, had springs on their feet and jumped around, some biked around, etc. This clown show similarly moved around the town and we ran into it several times. The girls had no interest in watching this show, and neither did we. We left our group of friends and went off on our own to do some rides instead to finish off the night.
One of the other highlights was the little bangers, which we bought hundreds of for the girls to throw. There’s something satisfying about the little explosions they make! All in all, the fiesta was a LOT of fun! But after so many late nights in a row, and a lot of food (including churros con chocolate most nights… yum!), we were ready to try to get a couple of earlier sleeping nights in to recover from all the fun! Another Spanish experience we will not be forgetting anytime soon!
