I realized I hadn't posted anything about Fallas. It's a bit difficult to explain and you truly have to experience it to know exactly what I'm talking about but I will attempt to regail you with what type of experience I had. To start of Fallas has a bunch of different parts to it, and each little part make up Fallas. The first part are Falleras. Each neighborhood or 'bario' has these. They are girls that wear very decorative (and from what we're told exremely expensive) dresses and are shown off in parades. There are hundreds of Falleras and they elect two, an older Fallera and a younger Fallera to be crowned basically the ultimate Fallera. We were told it is extremely political and deals a lot with how much money you have (are you surprised?). Second there are parades every day. Everywhere. Each neighborhood has their own band and gets all of their people together and march the streets. It gets really difficult to even walk out of the dorm sometimes because of parades walking by. Third, there are Fallas, enormous paper miche (I'm not sure if I spelled that right but it sounds like Muh-Shay (like my brother). They are supposed to represent things that they do not like and want to try to rid from their lives. They're in each neighborhood plaza and I can't reiterate how large they are. Fourth, there are fireworks. And by fireworks I don't mean the sissy ones we have in the states (you think I'm kidding). The ones you can buy on the streets I can just see every mom in the states drafting letters to Obama telling him to ban them because they're so loud. If you're a tourist and the Spaniards see you, they'll throw them at your feet. You wake up in the morning and it literally sounds like a war-zone. It's awesome. Moreover (great transition word) they have fireworks every night. We were told they are second in the world for fireworks. When I saw them I almost cried because I knew we had to pick up the pace in the states. I'm a huge fan of the 4th of July. We beat those nazi's back in dubya dubya two and gained our independence. We need to celebrate with bigger fireworks. I'm serious though I was blown away (pun intended) when I say they were amazing firework shows. Lastly at the end of the week they burn the Fallas. We saw 4 burn down because they burn them all around the same time but it's like a house burning. We've got pictures from it where we are standing in front of it and it looks like we're smiling that a building behind us is set ablaze. Feel comforted all mothers reading this, they engineer each Fallas to fall straight down and they have firefighters at each fallas spraying water on it to make sure it doesn't get completely out of control. At your next town hall meeting, suggest we have a festival like this and see how hard they laugh. You want people to dress up and walk around in seemingly unorganized parades in unbelievably expensive dresses, build huge structures made out of paper with the ability to catch on fire and place them near where people live, throw fireworks EVERYWHERE, shut down the city for a week, purchase hundreds of thousands of flowers to build a huge structure of the Virgin Mary, jack prices of food and drinks up (that one's always possible though), have 45 minute long firework shows every night for a week, and then burn down the structures that took a year to build? HAHA you've gotta be outa your freaking mind. Safety first America remember?
Pictures: Me in front of the burning Fallas, Burning Fallas, Plaza de Virgin, and two examples of Fallas pre burn. Enjoy.
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