Fallas en Valencia!

Mar 19, 2009 in

On last Friday at about 20:00 I called one of my flatmates if he wants to go to a bar or something. He said that this is not possible since he is in Murcia right now and will journey on to Valencia, to a fiesta called Fallas. Fallas is a festival which is only celebrated in Valencia and basically centers on giant paper-mâché statues, filled with firecrackers and burnt on the last day of the festival. Sounds familiar? (click!)
Well, this is not the whole story of course. The background is different. For starters, the statues do not resemble gods but are characters and caricatures that remind me of Disneyland. Then, there these fireworks (“mazqletas”) at 14:00 every day that are so loud that they shake the ground, parades etc. every day :-) For the rest I entrust you to Wikipedia.

Well, he told me that Valencia is very far from Granada – about an 8 hours drive. But that doesn’t hold ME!!!… Ha!… Ha Ha Ha!

I took the bus at 2:30 in the morning. And thanks to my hard training in various buses in India, I slept altogether almost 6 hours1.
And actually this was the most sleep I got during the weekend. Because I left on so short notice, there was no hostel to be found. So the things I packed for the journey was a camera and my sleeping bag. At the end I slept the one night in some park with some other homeless people.


1 “Ha! You call this a night bus?! The windows do not even rattle in their frames! … And what is this?!: Upholstered seats?, adjustable for height?? Do you think I am a sissy?! This is not a night bus, this is a sissy-wagon!!”