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Well back and again with Valencian adventures, this time on English mode so this post could be a little more international, as a shown of my concern for my non-Spanish-speaking readers.Today's post is about what happened around here during Fallas time and all the activities wich where involved during this celebration.
A little bit of story about this holidays is that back in the good ol' medieval days carpenters in Valencia held special devotion to Saint Joseph and on the 19th of march, every year, they took a day off to worship him and also to take the opportunity to clean their workshops from pieces of wood and stuff left by putting all that on the street and start a fire. Obviously neighbors also joined the fire with old furniture or clothing to burn and before you know it, became a big gathering. As the years went by people started to dress up this pieces of wood and arranging them on a shape of people or animals in order to parody daily life situations. Nowadays these wooden sculptures are called fallas (also the whole celebration is called that way) and there are every year more than 300 of 'em scattered trough the city, each one sponsored and taken care of by a special committee called Casal Fallero. The 5 days celebration starts on the 15th of March by setting all the fallas up and lasts until the night of the 19th (Saint Joseph's day) in which the fallas are burnt away.
Further information
There are many activities during this holidays here, not to mention that the amount of people visiting is astonishing, although basically there are typical events at night or day to which most of the people attend. I won't go to much into details about'em which is why I strongly suggest to check the "Further information" link posted few lines ago. What I can definitely tell is that during these days I had holidays from work and university from the 15th to the 24th of March, thanks to the combination of Fallas and Eastern, for which I was more than grateful. So as I was free Christine decided fly in to Valencia for a couple of weeks to spend time with me and check what this Fallas thing is all about, as well as one of her very good friends (and I proudly say also one of mine) Martina.
Since there were many things to do, and so little time and energy to do them, we got a schedule of the already programmed events for every day and chose some of them as our goals for that specific day. Honestly if we were to pursue each one of the things happening around the city we would've died. Specially because every night we went to the fireworks (which started at 1:00 am) and then we hit every verbena (parties organized around the fallas) we could see until early hours in the morning. Every single day we did this, until the very last Cremá (Burning) night in which all these festivities where over and we couldn't take it any more.
However during this time we hung out with lots of people and made very good new friends such as my man Paco, from Madrid and many others which I'm not gonna mention coz then it'll fill my blog out of "special thanks". Good thing after the last night vacations where still on, for Eastern holidays cause then we had time to recover from the hard-5-day-long-partying.
