Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I am standing in front of a woman with flowing mermaid hair. She’s holding puppies, deer, and a little leopard cub. Her expression is similar to that of the Virgin Mary’s in Renaissance paintings—eyes uplifted, distant. And her eyes are distant, literally, because her legs are three times as tall as I am.

I turn to my roommate, Christine. “What do you think it is?”

She sqints at the placard, trying to decipher it. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem for us, as we speak Spanish, but the placard is written in Valenciano, a language similar to Catalán. I join her in squinting as others swarm around us.

“I don’t know… I can make out the word ‘nature’… maybe it has to do with the oil spill off the coast of Galicia?”

“Ah… ” I nod sagely. “You’re probably right.”

We are wandering the streets of Valencia amongst three-dimensional, multiple-story, farcical depictions of the past year’s events, part of the annual tradition known as Las Fallas. (Falla translates as "failure," and the tradition involves creating objects that represent the previous year's failures.)

Falla artists develop an idea soon after the previous year’s celebration ends and work on their display all year long, usually with the help of neighborhood’s residents. All of the fallas, except a lucky one or two destined for the museum, will be burned at the end of the week in a symbolic cleansing.

We spend the afternoon wandering among the fallas, weaving our way through churro vendors and firecrackers, and waiting for an incredibly long procession of children dressed like 17th-century royalty to pass. At midnight, we find ourselves in a current of people streaming along the walls of a sunken, five-kilometer garden. Traffic is stopped everywhere, and people have parked their cars on the side of the bridge, sitting on top of them to wait for the fireworks show.

The street is crowded so thickly that we literally cannot move, and we clutch tightly to our bags. At one point, I wonder if my feet are touching the ground or if I’m suspended between those around me. A man beside me tries to make his way inside one of the bars to the bathroom, but gives up, peeing onto the tree next to him to cheers from the crowd.

We finally burst through, and I breathe again.

Around 2 a.m., we meet up with some Spanish friends.

“What are you doing?” we ask.

“A competition,” they tell us. As it turns out, they are having a paella-cooking competition at two in the morning in the middle of the street. We sample the vegetable, chicken, squid, and seafood paella, sitting in the dark a few streets away from chaos.

On the final night, it’s time for the cleansing. We park ourselves in front of a falla full of gigantic old people cavorting in diapers, depicting the newfound joys of retirement. They lounge on beach chairs in string bikinis, showing off their wizened, over-tanned bodies. An old man swoops into bed on a bed-tassel labeled “Viagra,” while his wife waits for him, a coquettish expression on her face. Her teeth and wig are on the table beside her.

Firefighters set off an initial firecracker on the ropes leading up to our falla; others are already burning in the blocks around us, sending copious amounts of smoke curling upwards.

Made of a wood and paper base, our falla erupts into flames and burns away in no time at all. It is one in the morning and there are ashes on the street, but the world is clean once more.