Burn one down...at Las Fallas

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As Katie would put it...we got "Falla'd up"!

Last weekend, I headed down to Valencia to see Las Fallas. It's a festival held annually in Valencia to celebrate St. Joseph, and they they do so by burning down these creations called "fallas". The gigantic styrofoam and paint sculptures that took the artists an entire year to design and build, and some cost up to 200,000 Euros!!! And all of this work only goes to be burned down doing La Crema on the Friday night of the festival. Yes. 200,000 Euros spent for a giant bonfire. Only the winning Falla is saved and moved to the museum in Valencia.

The festival kicked off on Thursday night with parades by people dressed in olden time clothing... truthfully I'm not exactly sure what this represents. At night, Katie, Kathrin, Morgan, Anna, Sara and I watched the fireworks from Puente Real on "El Rio". "El Rio" is not really a river, but a park. And the fireworks started at 1:30am and there were def children there. That's how you know you're in Spain.

Of course being in Valencia, or the home of paella, I had to have some! Truthfully...I was a bit disappointed. I found most of the ones I tried to salty, though they were cheap. Personally, I prefer the bunuelos y chocolate caliente. Bunuelos are donuts made out of pumpkin, though you can't actually taste the pumpkin flavour, and the chocolate caliente is more like hot chocolate pudding that is used as a dipping sauce for the bunuelos. Mmmm 😊

The biggest night of Las Fallas is Friday, where the Fallas are burnt during La Crema. Some other ESADE students came and met us for the night (literally, they peaced at 3 am to go back to BCN). Though I was excited for La Crema, the wait was horrendous. We were literally trapped by the hordes of people in Plaza Ayuntamiento that when we got tired of waiting and tried to leave, we couldn't even. The crowds in Valencia were insane, especially considering that the streets are pretty narrow in the old city.

On Saturday, the festival was essentially over, so Kathrin and I headed over to the modern buildings, that according to her, were really famous. (I had never heard of them...) As our luck would have it, by the time we reached the beach in Valencia, it started to rain. So we headed back towards the old city for one last Valencian paella before hopping on the bus back to Barca.

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