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Published: June 17th 2009
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The streets are lined with lights!!! Beautiful!WHAT.a.WEEK!!!
I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to take part in the Corpus Christi Festival. Just a little info about it I learned throughout the week. It is a Catholic feast/celebration of no particular point in the life of Jesus, just rather celebrating the actual Body of Christ. Thursday is the "holy" day of the week when most of the worshiping is done on. Although, throughout the week there was a carnival/fair event, parades, fireworks, dancing, bands, etc. Some highlights (although there were TONS) from my week:
On Monday night, the group took a bus out to the "ferial" which I translated to be the "fairgrounds." There was an amazing fireworks show and the "Inauguration." I kept asking who was getting inaugurated, and come to find out, it was just the beginning of the "festival" in general. The amount of people that were there is seriously unexplainable, I bet it was at least 8,000ish...i.e. the town of Rice Lake! We watched the fireworks and then tried to head through the Plaza Del Torres-but NO ONE was moving, just standing there. We were all so confused and then all of a sudden the whole plaza structure LIT UP! A
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The nice surprise we had! band started playing and people went NUTS. It was such a neat moment, which was a complete surprise! I took that to be the "Inauguration."
Inside the ferial there were 2 levels. The upper one was rows and rows of food booths, tents with Flamenco dancers, disco techas, and little places to sit down and eat. The lower level was where the hoodlums were! Games and rides and such. We walked up and down the rows and did what we like to call "cultural observation" aka people watching. It was so interesting to see how much alike the cultures are when it comes to carnivals.
The next night we went to a plaza closer to the center of town and watched a flamenco variety show! This was one thing I wanted to see SO badly and it turned out to COMPLETELY surpass my expectations! There were kids as young as 4 up on the stage doing these long dances with so much attitude and emotion! Then the groups just kept coming, elementary kids, adolescents, young adults, middle aged women, and even older women. My host Mom is actually a flamenco dancer (and teaches classes too-she said she could teach
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people in front of me... me!!) and she had her fancy dress on, hair done, and the classic flamenco shoes on most of the nights. The whole thing was way cooler than I ever imagined!
Another night, a group of us girls went to the ferial again and went dancing! Which was SOOOO much fun! The music is so upbeat and everybody just has so much energy! I feel like that was a good enough workout for the rest of the week! 😊
On Thursday, the big religious day of the week, I went to the parade! WOW. What a cultural experience!! There were these characters, I did not know what they symbolized (my host Mom said some things just don't make sense in the parade) who had these HUGE cartoon heads with their regular sized body, walking through the streets bashing people on the head with punching balloons....? There were also many different groups of people all dressed in different costumes from a different royalty-those costumes were SO NEAT! Although I kinda felt bad since it was about 96 degrees F that day...
Another interesting aspect of the parade was the hay on the streets. I later figured out, the bed of hay
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People in back of me... covering the streets was to possibly keep the horses from slipping since the streets here are real slick/brick.
This last Sunday was another fireworks show to celebrate the end of the week. Our group went out for wine and Tapas and then went to a park to watch the show. (Tapas are FREE appetizers when you order a drink, and they are different at every place! Granada is known for there delicious, free Tapas!)
Amazing week in general and I still can't say that enough!
Besos!
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Terry Robinson
non-member comment
look like fun!
Hi Sarah! After reading of all the fun you are having I am very excited for Odin to begin his adventure. I hope he has as many great experiences as you did (minus maybe teh cliff jumping!) Terry