Sant Joan in Barcelona--craziness

Bombs. Explosions. Human towers. A couple hundred thousand people plus, who knows, the Sant Joan (San Juan) festival in Barcelona was ridiculous. For a couple days before the actual festival last weekend there were random scattered bombs going off throughout the city, startling you when you were eating whether in the apartment, in restaurants, cabs, wherever and everywhere. The cabs on Saturday even drive with all of their windows up to make sure no errant bombs get tossed in by accident or on purpose it´s so widespread.

So on Saturday we started the night be seeing some of the main cultural events that kick off the festival that continues with various events for the next six weeks or so by going and seeing a couple human towers that are held each year. A flame is brought in from some relatively distant historically significant place supposedly, and after it arrives on site they carry it to the main plaza for the main showing of the human towers. There are hilarious looking hugely tall people-costumes maybe 15 feet tall carried on peoples´shoulders that march around. Thousands of very large fireworks are being continuously set off around the park during the whole event with music playing, people dancing, and a HUGE bonfire being lit that would only allow people to stand no closer than a good 100 feet, minimum, because it´s so huge and the flames are so hot. It was definitely one of, if not the, most fun time that I´ve had in Barcelona to date.

On the beach is where the hundreds of thousands of people pack themselves in. The several miles of beach is packed solid, water to buildings, with people dancing and having fireworks thrown randomly between everyone (vary dangerously I might add). We dodges a couple very close calls ourselves. Everyone stays up on the beach and hangs out all night, a good majority of which wait and watch the sunrise early in the morning. I stayed the whole night and then tried to take either a cab or the metro back to my apartment, neither of which was possible even at 7am because of the amount of people trying to do the same thing. We walked for a mile or two to find a metro that wasn´t so clogged that we could actually get on. The next day nothing is open, everyone sleeps. I followed suit.

So that was this last weekend, I´ll go ahead and post the pictures whenever I get a chance (probably a day or so from now).

I´m in Madrid right now, getting ready to go out and take part in the crazy festival that´s going on here at the moment. We didn´t plan to be here specifically for the festival, it´s an LGBT festival actually, with a couple million interesting characters coming to the city for a huge gathering. So needless to say, if you understand the acronym, it´s interesting. There are some characters around here right now for sure, wow. But I got to see the Museo del Reina Sofia today, which was awesome. I loved the Dalí exhibits and especially the TONS of cool Picasso paintings there of which Guernica was the one I was looking forward to seeing the most. Tomorrow will be the Prado for the second time this summer, a couple gardens and the Thyssen. I´ll fill you all in as soon as I get the chance, have a great weekend people!