This post is showing up a little late, about a week late. My bad. The reason? Well, I wanted to cover a party that took a week and half. That’s right, a week and a half long party, every day, every night, happened in Barcelona. It involved massive paper giants, fire breathing dragons, some weird stick dancing, 50 foot tall human towers, and massive quantities of alcohol throughout the entire city. The festival, of course, is known as La Merce.

Look mom, I can see all the drunk people from up here!

La Merce dates back to the middle ages, as all things in Barcelona does. Apparently there was a literal biblical plague that descended upon Catalonia at the time. I’m talking locusts and what not. So the parliament got to together and just said, “Screw it, lets see if God can help us out.” So they prayed to Mary to intercede on their behalf, and the locusts went away. Mission accomplished. Mary, the Virgin of Mercy, saved the day. Being some halfway decent folks and all, and not wanting to piss off the celestial being, they decided to make Mary the patron saint of Barcelona, and dedicate a whole week of drinking and debauchery in her honor.

Take the peyote man, it makes everything turn green….

So every night for about ten days, there are fireworks, parades, dances, weird fake fighting, and good old fashioned revelry. In order to start it out, you have to have massive papier mache statues, clearly.

Sooooo life like!

These statues are called Gigantes and are at least 20 feet high, on the low end. They typically are carried by one person who wears a harness on his/her shoulders and walks around doing giant people things. And by giant people thing, I mean dance!

No club music here, only the classics.

These statues are meant to represent important members of Spanish society and history, and there’s been a few stalwarts over there years.

Such as Ferdiand and Isabella

and a pharaoh?

Ok, I’ll be honest, I don’t know why half of these are here.

Especially these! They’re not even from the right hemisphere. 

Anyways, the point is is that people spend the entire year building these massive paper giants, and then dance with them for about twenty minutes. Because after the dancing and parade, there’s a darker side, muahahahaaaaaaaa. Gangs of drummers band together and have their own party which takes over the plus sized dancing show. These gangs have also spent the whole year building statues, but they’re a little more dangerous.

Welcome to the parade of creepiness…I just made that up because I don’t know what its actually called.

After the Gigantes dance, they are chased out by demons that spout fire. This parade lasts longer than the Gigantes and is one of the few times you see people cheering as spouts of fire rain down on their perm.

Try to sleep well tonight.

Kitty!

I don’t even know what’s going on here. 

Puff the magic dragon…..Ok this is still pretty creepy. 

And these are not some sort of well protected, thought out, pieces of equipment. I saw broken flares hanging off clamps, and while the demon statue was dancing flames shot right into some woman’s hair.

Every demon, as mentioned earlier, has their own drum band. Its one of the few times band nerds can truly feel part of the party…

All those years in marching band totally paid off!

So that’s just one evening in the La Merce festival. Every other day there’s a myriad of activities going on.

Like street festivals in our alley. Those streamers worked out as well as you’d think

And jovial historical dancing

And an orchestra!

Also, there’s some weird stick dancing thing that goes on too. All very hippy-esque.

This kid is super excited, but he has no idea what’s going on. 

Don’t forget the human castles. Yes, I mentioned it in my headline, so I should probably explain. In one of my earlier posts, I exposed you tot he Catalan tradition of piling on top of each other and seeing how high you can get. Imagine 100 people getting together, having a couple of drinks and saying “Hey, stand on my shoulders while I walk around. Let’s see how many people we can get!” That’s kind of what happens. So people jump on top of each other and literally surpass buildings. Once they feel they can’t get any higher, they send a kid over the top to wave and they all slide back down.

Ow! That’s my head! Hold!Almost there!
Hurry kid, get over the top!

These are done as competitions and the teams will see who can get the highest. On this day there were only three teams, and they took forever to get moving.

They can go pretty high up.

And be incredibly intricateAlso, you’ve gotta be pretty comfortable with yourself to do this

Even when the bratty kids of the rich people aren’t impressed.

All in all it was a pretty enjoyable week. We had some dinner parties and got to catch some fireworks. Oh, and Yi showed up so that’s a good thing! Don’t worry though, I’ll post more about this week to make you all feel special and warm too.

I don’t even know….

Welcome home!