La Mercé!

hola!

This past weekend was the festival weekend for the patron saint of Barcelona, La Mercé. It started thursday night and went until early hours monday morning! What a fantastic weekend. Definitely one of the best of my entire life for sure.

Every single day and night there were concerts outside of my apartment! The 2nd night there was a giant reggae concert in our street and my friends and I pushed our way to the front row and just completely rockedddddd out. The band was from Senegal..this was intense reggae...and during the last song it started pouring..such an experience. So so so fun. People were at our apartment every afternoon and night because of our amazing view of the concert below and the fact that there were two other nearby plazas having concerts as well!

During the days there were many traditional activities going on..the picture in this post is of a castell. The castelles are human towers done by teams that represent different neighborhoods/areas of the city. The teams actually race each other and the two top people are very young children! They even wear helmets!

There was also a fire parade/procession during one of the evenings called a Correfoc. Correfoc is the night when teams run through arbors of fire and hold spray torches that are lit and run into the watching crowds, each team representing a different devil, the evil representation of each of the neighborhoods. Its so hard to explain, but its just amazing. Everyone fills the streets for eaach theatrical stage, every concert, parade everywhere in the city. Americans need to learn to let go and celebrate as well as Spaniards.

more pictures to follow this post!

:) Clare