The weekend of September 23rd-25th was La Mercé! It is a festival held every year in Barcelona to celebrate the city's patron saint, Our Lady of Merce or La Mercé. The story goes that the city of Barcelona was attacked by a plague of locusts so the city prayed to their saint at the time, Saint Eulalia, but girlfriend wasn't getting the job done so they prayed to La Mercé and low and behold, the plague of locusts went away. The good citizens of Barcelona then decided to ditch Saint Eulalia and named La Mercé the patron saint instead. One of our program directors told us that every year (give or take a few of course) it rains on the day of La Mercé, September 24th, because Saint Eulalia is crying over getting the boot and this year IT RAINED! So that was really cool, Saint Eulalia crying down on us.
The actual day is the 24th, but the festivities actually started a few days earlier on Thursday night with fireworks on the beach, concerts on the stages set up in plazas and parks all through out the city and TONS of people everywhere. Let me go ahead and let you know that they are all about dragons and fire during La Mercé. The first event we went to was the Procession of Fiery Beasts and Dragons, so pretty much a big parade of dragons and some other creepy creatures thrown in with sparklers and fire and different drumlines and bands through the streets.
Friday night's parade
This is actually right next to my friend's incredible apartment. Because we're living in a dream land.
The next day (September 24th, the actual day of La Mercé, rain day!) a group of us all met up and just walked around the city all day to different parks and stages. We found this giant mammoth sculpture in Parc de la Ciutadella and spent an embarrassingly long amount of time waiting for our own picture on it with all of the other 4 year olds....
Who wouldn't want a picture with this guy?
I want her skirt
The whole weekend was so fun because literally anywhere you went in the city there was something going on. While I was walking home for a siesta my friend and I just stumbled upon some other friends from our group waiting for Los Gegantes, a parade of these huge paper mache giants. It was soooo cool. And again, tons of people, lots of little kids trying to get under the gegantes with the people carrying them, and bands of these little flute things that I can only describe as Spain's version of the recorder. Bringing back those 4th grade memories. My favorite gegantes were the Gaudí head ones.
That night we all danced through the streets a bit and the next was the last and final day with the Human Towers and El Carrefoc! ("The Fire Run" in Catalan) The Human Towers were absolutely nuts. They have a base of men and then the women, and then these tiny little monkey children. They climb up each others bodies like it's nothing and then stand on each others shoulders, ending up with the base and then 8 more stories of people, so 9 total. The whole thing is really dangerous and people die from it every year in different groups that do it all over the country, but luckily no deaths in Barcelona, just a lot of nervousness. The youngest kids at the top have helmets, but my heart was still pounding every time as they climbed up. A nice older spanish couple was standing near us so they could explain more of the tradition to us. Whenever they are nearing the end everyone is supposed to get really quiet for the kids to climb up because it is so nerve wracking and a lot of the time either someone would signal that it wasn't sturdy enough to keep going or the kid would get nervous and then just slide down the ladder of bodies like they were a fire pole. But if they succeeded then the last kid would get all the way to the top, everyone would cheer, and then cross over to the other side and slide down.
And last but not least, El Carrefoc! They had told us before it was a fire run and they chase people down the street so if you were going to be in you should wear your hair back and long sleeved non-synthetic clothing and all that, to which I figured oh, I'm not going to run in it, so no big deal. Wrong. If you go to the street of Carrefoc, theres pretty much no way of avoiding being in it. At first there is this dragon-esque creature on a big platform in the middle of the street that everyone follows farther down the street to "The Gates of Hell" where naturally they spark up all of these swirling sparklers and fireworks and dance with their huge spinning fireworks down the middle of the street that is packed with people followed by the dragons from the parade with a lot more fire spewing out of them too. CRAZY. It was so fun, but Spain you are so crazy. A girl in my class wore flip flops and one of the huge sparks landed on her foot and she got burned pretty badly, but luckily (and by luckily I mean because anytime the fire was coming straight at us I was crouched down hiding by everyone's feet), we all came out unscathed.
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