Safety First? Not On Holidays...

As I mentioned, San Juan was celebrated on Thursday night to mark the summer solstice.  A couple friends and I went down to Parc de la Mar that sits between the cathedral and the sea-there was a concert stage set up and some other type of structure that we didn’t recognize. 

Around 11:00 pm the demons came out.  There was a holiday in January, San Sebastian, that also had demons, however I wasn’t in town for that so this was completely new.  Beckie, one of my other roommates, however, was present for San Sebastian and when Amanda and I told her we wanted to venture closer she told us absolutely not-they chase you with fire.  Hm…well, surely they don’t actually chase you with fire.  We’re going down anyway. 

They actually chase you with fire.  Not a controlled fire either.  These men that are dressed as devils, complete with ugly masks and goat horns, have something similar to a huge torch that is aflame and they come up behind you and almost literally scare the shit out of you by yelling things at you in Catalan.  And then they manhandle you and drag you to the ground or start thrusting you, but that’s a story for later.  You would thing that the open fire-on-a-stick among thousands of people would be dangerous enough…and you would be wrong.  They also carry around bottles of alcohol that they take a pull of and then blow onto the torch, and if that gets boring they light other fireworks that spin around above your head and emit sparks.  Into the crowd of people.  Overall, it was a really cool experience though I felt it was extremely dangerous.  At least they had Red Cross busses there.  

After part one of the festivities we headed down to the beach.  We didn’t really know what we were doing but apparently this holiday celebrates ‘a new beginning’ so you write something on paper to better yourself (a wish or something you want to improve), burn it, and then go for a cleansing swim in the ocean.  We decided to stay out of the ocean but sat by the water anyway and observed others; there were quite a few people there. 

The beach is really peaceful at night, I love that you can’t see where the water meets the sky; it’s just a black abyss. 

By the time we walked back home it was about 2:00 am and we were all pretty tired.  Needless to say, we slept in a little bit on Friday.