Five years
ago, I came to Barcelona to visit Chris
and to celebrate my 19th birthday. It also happened to be the time
of the Mercè festival; it was the first time I experienced a correfoc and saw
the castellers in the middle of the crowd at Plaça Sant Jaume. There were free
concerts everywhere, parades, light projection shows, fireworks at the beach: I
couldn’t have picked a better place to celebrate my birthday. This year, I was
finally there again to enjoy the biggest festival of Barcelona!By the way, I know this post is waaay to late… but weekends are short and Barcelona is way too much fun! My apologies.
Friday
night: street theater, light shows and vintage fun fair
The first
night of the festival, we decided to take a look at what was happening in Parc
Ciutadella. We sat down for a street theatre performance, not knowing what it
was about and having very little expectations. It turned out to be surprisingly
fun and original; I’ve never seen anything like it! The group was called Sirqus
Alfon, they were from Sweden, and they were pretty insane. I especially loved
the moment where they randomly asked a girl in the audience what her name was
and where she was from (“I’m from Russia”, she answered, with a strong
Rrrrussian accent and an awkard little laugh). They secretly recorded this
sentence and used it in a 10 minute long song, repeating it over and over
again. Hilarious!
The day after, when we passed by another performance of Sirqus Alfon
Overall
there as was a very special atmosphere in the park, with the outdoor
performances (the audience sitting on low wooden benches, surrounded by little
lights), the crazy light installations, laser shows… There was even a vintage
looking fun fair (which looked a little bit creepy in the middle of the night).
It reminded me a little of the Noorderzon festival in Groningen… I miss you Groningen!
Saturday
night: wine tasting festival and firework at the beach
Saturday
was a good day… The weather was absolutely great, with a clear blue sky and a
burning hot sun all day long. We went to the Wine tasting Festival at Arc de
Triomf, where we were drinking all sorts of wine all day long. Not
surprisingly, this was lots of fun. I had some really good wine, beautiful
cheese snacks (goat cheese, I love you!) and a delicious blueberry cheese cake.
This was a really good day…
Afterwards, we went to a the Red Ant noodle bar. The food was pretty damn good for 6/7 euros (I had salmon, coconut rice, fried onion… I told you this was a good day!). One of our friends brought his wine glass from the festival to the restaurant and demanded he got his wine served in this glass. The waitress then insisted she would clean it first and probably thought we were either very strange or drunk (both might have been true).
We ended the night at the beach with a fresh beer (mine served in one of the wine glasses we were carrying around the whole day), watching the fireworks… Yep, it was a pretty good day!
Never gets boring: watching fireworks at the beach
Sunday:
castellers and correfoc
Sunday it
was time for some real Catalan traditions (or madness). We got up a bit early
to squeeze ourselves in the crowd at Plaça Sant Jaume and watch the Catalan
human towers. It was amazing and unreal at the same time, seeing these little
kids climbing all the way up, the towers dangerously shaking… One tower
actually fell down! I took a picture of it without realizing it was falling. It
was silent for a moment, people looked scared and a kid was even crying but
luckily nobody got hurt. Still, they got back up again and it was impressive as
always!
A pile of arms and legs, when the tower fell down...
At night,
it was time to put on some long pants and a sweater, I was even wearing a hoody
and sunglasses (gangsta!). Why? It was time for the craziest Catalan tradition
of all: the correfoc. Like I mentioned in the Gracia festival post, a correfoc
is a Catalan fire run, where people dressed as devils run around with fireworks and
evil looking creatures. This time, I got closer (a lot closer then I probably
should have) and we had 1,5 hours of fun, dancing in the sparkling streets,
while drum bands and fire spitting monsters were passing by. Once
again, I insist, this is something you should experience at least once in your
life!
This dude... right after I took this picture, all I could do was hide my face against a wall, we were completely covered in fireworks for a minute.
Tuesday
night: cocktails and Giants
Monday, we
went back to work and skipped whatever was happening during the festival. There
was so much going on that week, it’s impossible to keep up… The next day (my
birthday actually, I took a day off) we went for a drink in town and watched
the Giant’s parade, another Catalan tradition. This time, the giants were
reaaally weird… All the pictures I took were pretty much crap (my 5 year old
baby can’t take pictures in the dark) but here’s an image of what we have
witnessed that night. The themes were just…. so different. Kings, princesses,
Star Wars, Napoleon, giant dog head next to old women dressed like babies, giant
guy in a shower and girls wearing nothing but a towel, giant nuns (one was
holding the book Fifty Shades of Grey), traditional Catalan guy, giant bird
head with BOOBS..!? Let me remind you this was a kid’s event. And no, we were
not on drugs.
The rest of
the night we spent at Sub Rosa, a little cocktail bar we found in Gótico where
it was happy hour all night. Good find!
Wednesday
night: tapas and (yawn) more fireworks
The last
night of the festival, we went to our favorite tapas restaurant in Barceloneta,
Bitácora. I don’t know why I never wrote about it, but somehow I forget to take
pictures every single time (probably because I forget about everything else
when I see melting goat cheese and tempura asparagus on the table). After this
delicious meal, we went to Plaça Espanya to see the final fireworks. We were 15
minutes late, but we thought it was going to be an hour long anyway. But no,
after 10 minutes of a fireworks and some vague Catalan video it was over! I
remembered the fireworks being incredible five years ago, but this was a little
disappointing and over in no time. As a result, we were standing in the middle
of a HUGE crowed, metros were overcrowded and it took forever to get home. But
yeah, living in Barcelona makes us spoiled, if you look at all the days we had
before!
Just
another week in Barcelona…
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