Fiesta de San Juan 

(This was meant to be up two days ago.  The site was down.)

 

We talked a little about San Juan (Sant Joan in Catalán) today in class, along with the observation that Americans drink a lot of milk.  I never realized it, but apparently we are “obsessed with milk and yogurt”.  And apparently we consume our dairy products in containers far too large for our own good – and I remembered myself in the market down the street from my apartment begging my mom to buy two bottles of milk because they ran out too quickly and I hated having to buy milk every day.  Interesting note by the Europeans! A new girl in our afternoon class from Maine, who looked much younger than me but was actually graduated from college already, was not pleased with the friendly jokes, and it was very uncomfortable sitting next to her and hearing her mumble angrily under her breath. But class is not all about picking on Americans; we pick on every nationality.  Germans are too tall, have beer bellies and an ugly language; the French are rude; every sentence containing the word “Russians” also contains “vodka”.  Yeah, class is productive. 

 

Back to the real subject of the day: Día de San Juan Fiesta! The bombs began early in the morning.  Well actually they were firecrackers with the sound intensity of bombs.  Our group of adults and two teenagers was like a class of schoolchildren, waiting to get out for Christmas Break.  We will not have school tomorrow, so we were all anxious to get outside.  My mom and I had a great time at Nova Icaria Beach, where we met some really nice Americans from Florida.  It was nice to hear some familiar voices for a change.  When I told them what I was doing in Barcelona and how long we were staying for, they said something that really put things into perspective for me.  “Do you know how lucky you are to be here?  We would have never dreamed of coming here when we were your age,” they laughed.  “We had to wait until we were in our fifties before we were financially able to make a trip like this!”  And are only here for two weeks.

 

 

As it grew dark after dinner (during which we had the perfect seat overlooking the marina), the kids started bringing out the fuegos artificiales (fireworks), and the party began.  The beach was filling with the goers of the annual Fiesta de San Juan, a huge beach gathering that people come out-of-town for to experience.  During the fiesta, the people stay out until six in the morning, and everything is closed the next day.  Everything.  My mom and I made it until about 12:30 and then we started to get tired.  (We can hardly handle waiting to eat at 8:30!)  On our way back down the beach, mom got shot with a piece of explosive from about a hundred feet away, and it hurt.  Then I got shot with a piece of explosive from about three feet away, and it hurt a lot more.  In fact, a nice bruise formed within 30 seconds from the forceful impact.  As we made our way to the Metro, everybody else was making their way to the beach.  As mom put it, we were “salmon swimming upstream”.  And oh boy, were we fighting the current.  When we finally made it up from the underground station in our neighborhood, we were stopped by three or four American girls.  “Eengles?” one asked in a poor accent.  We looked at them. “Umm, dónde está el beach –?”  “We speak English,” I said, trying not to show how happy I was that some poor Americans had mistaken us for locals. “Oh, yay!  Is the beach this way?”  We instructed them to take the Metro because it was about a thirty-minute walk, and that they were going in the wrong direction.  They thanked us and we sleepily made our way back home… or at least we thought we did.  Turns out we started walking the wrong way when we got out of the Metro, and we had told those girls to go the wrong way, too.  We were actually walking towards the beach… Whoops!  We hurried back to our apartment so that we didn’t pass them again when they figured out that they weren’t seeing any palm trees.  I still feel terrible – I keep telling myself that they figured it out immediately so I don’t lose sleep over it.  It’s no use though, because I won’t get much sleep due to the bombs and fireworks going on outside the window.   ¡Buenas noches!