The (other) Festival of Lights

I went to this festival.  It's called Las Fallas.  It was awesome (and I mean that in the true sense of the word).

Imagine spending the entire year working on a huge piece of art full of color and well thought out themes and social commentary, building it to be the height of a small building, putting it out on display, winning a prize for it, and then...lighting it on fire.

That's right.  During Las Fallas, people build these incredible structures that cost tons of money only to light them on fire throughout the city, alongside incredible light shows, professional fireworks, and some not-so-professional fireworks.  The booming pops created the sense that we were in a war zone, but filled with joy.  Can you picture it?  It's a hard one, I know.

Las Fallas takes place in a Southern city on the coast of Spain called Valencia.  The festival lasts for a while and includes street food, vendors, minor explosives, and of course, the works of art which are called Las Fallas.  On the last day of the festival, the fallas are burned--and the whole country takes the day off.  It also happens to take place on the Spanish Father's Day, which is "St. Joseph's Day" according to the Catholic Church.  I do not know if the two events are related.

Honestly, I'm still not really sure what the point of Las Fallas is.  It was, however, one of the most fun and crazy things I've done here.  My friends and I wandered around the city finding fallas along the way, eventually ending up at the city center where the biggest, grandest, most awarded fallas stood.  The one to the left was called Paris.  Each falla had various scenes going on all around its three-dimensional self.  It was truly a sight to see.  It felt almost sad to burn them, but also undeniably exhilarating--and I didn't even have a part in building them.  I didn't even know what they were going to look like.  Let's just say that I was probably one of the least directly connected, in-the-know people there and yet the whole spectacle wrapped me in its embrace, enchanting me with parades and music and colors and lights and streets where 5 year old children played with fire.  A little dangerous, a lot never gonna happen in the U.S.  It belongs in Spain.

Watching the huge fire, which was preempted by our favorite songs (Ay se tu pego and Waka Waka) and accompanied by Spanish Opera, was insane.  The firefighters presence was certainly comforting and certainly necessary.  After all the burning was complete, the city looked like a wasteland.  The leftover flames fighting for their last breaths, the smiling people covered in ash, and the tired tourists boarding the busses back to Madrid at 3 AM.

Las Fallas was an adventure.  It was an event in every sense of the word.  It was exactly what I needed to get me out of the mid-semester slump I had been in that weekend.

The memory will be burned in my mind forever.