¡Viva la Sardina!, ¡Olé!, y mis padres

Man, I´ve needing to update like, whoa. Hopefully I´ll remember everything I need to say. Never had time to update this weekend because, as I briefly mentioned, mom and dad came to visit from the States for a few days. More on that in a bit...

So last Wednesday marked (what I think is) the end of Carnaval: La Muerte de la Sardina. I posted pictures of this on Flickr last week, but I suppose it deserves some explanation. Traditionally, this event is supposed to mark the beginning of Lent (some big Christian thing, I´m told), so everybody dresses up in all black, like a funeral, and is supposed to carry a sardine somewhere and bury it. I guess this symbolizes putting the meat away or whatever. I never understood the whole Lent thing to begin with.

So at the Alicante one, it was a little different than was explained to me. Basically, all the drag queens come out in black along with the rest of the the hardcore (mostly) middle-aged Carnival-goers. Most of people were dressed in extravagent funeral clothing and everybody met at the top of Las Ramblas where there was a giant paper/wooden fish that people were carrying and dancing around with. There was also a seemingly less important paper/wooden ship, and a dude with a PA system on a roller cart who was chanting like a pope (I think popes chant, right?). So, there is this small marching band that keeps playing little songs, and then all of a sudden they break into a dance/march down last Ramblas. So the fish/ship people dance, the band plays cadences and songs, while everyone else follows doing call and response chanting with the pope guy (Viva la Sardina!, Amen, etc.). The procession cuts into the Barrio at one point, and does the same spiel down the narrow streets for a while, until we hit a small plaza with a stage set up. Everybody pours in, and the ship and sardine are placed in the middle of the plaza, where they are doused in some sort of flammable liquid. The band is playing, and the pope gets up on the stage and the call and response continues for 10 more minutes. Then they light the spark sticks and suddenly everything is up in flames. Excellent! When the fire dies down a tad, everybody dances around the wreckage while music plays in the background. It was a very cool night, even though there weren´t more than 150-175 people in attendance.

The whole thing seemed to mock the Church a little, but it didn´t seem excessively derisive. It seemed as though it was all in good fun. I was told that La Muerte de la Sardina is a bigger event in other cities, but for tiny Alicante, it´s apparantly only for the hardcore of the celebrators. There was no ridiculous borrachos (drunks) like during the weekend festivities.

That was probably the most notable thing I did last week. This past Friday was rather uneventful, and things were especially dead since everybody was probably all partied out from Caraval. The parents showed up on Saturday in the afternoon...

They were tired, of course, from travelling for almost an entire day straight, but happy to be in Spain visiting their better child. Neither of my parents really speaks any Spanish, so I had it figured that this could be a very difficult few days. The other hurdle I am facing is the total lack of shit to do in Alicante when it isn´t warm enough to sit your pale ass on the beach all day. So Saturday was low key since they were both travel-wary and jet-lagged. Sunday was the day for the parents to come to the host family´s place for comida. This, I thought, was going to be an awkward disaster, but I was completely off mark. I figured I would be the only way any sort of communicating happened between my Amercan and Spanish families, but my mom had a phrase book and was able to hold her own quite well. She ended up asking a lot of her own questions, which made my life much easier (translating from English to Spanish is much harder than vice-versa). So things went pretty smoothly and there was a good amount of conversation going on, with only a few awkward pauses. On the whole, I´d say it was a successful lunch.

We departed a while afterwards for mine and my parents´ very first bullfight (pictures will be up on Flickr soon). Now I suppose I had an idea of what these things were like, but actually going to one was a very different experience than I was expecting. For the most part, much of Spain has become disgusted with the idea of the bullfight (with good cause), so it is now a "sport" relished solely by old-schoolers (read: old dudes who smoke cigars) and witnessed by confounded tourists. I personally had a great time, and was fascinated by the brutality of it, but I can easily see why it´s not for everyone, or even for most self-respecting people.

To start, they let the bull out into the ring and run him around a few times to get him riled up. There are several guys with pink sheets/capes that take turns waving them to get the bull to move around where they want it. They will move him around until the Picador comes out. The Picador is a dude on a horse (which has some sort of horn-proof armor on) with a giant spear. They get the bull to go near enough so the picador can stab him directly in the back, a little below it´s head. Of course, the bull starts ramming the horse (who is blindfolded for obvious reasons) like crazy, so the Picador just rams the spear in that much harder. After a minute or two of this, they lure the bull away, and the Picador leaves the ring. After this, three guys will come out, one at a time, with two harpoon tipped spears in their hands (maybe 2 and a half feet long at most). The dudes with pink capes get the bull to see the dude with spears and then they (the bull and the spear dude) charge each other, resulting in a present for the bull (two harpoon spears in it´s back). That ends up being 6 spears total if your math is shoddy. These effectively tear up the muscles in the bull´s back/shoulders, tiring it out and making it more manageable for the the final matador guy who comes out (or so my mom overheard someone saying). At this point, this guy comes out with a blood red cape and a sword, and messes around with the bull for a while. This is where he gets to show off a lot and do all the fancy crap that most people assume is what a bullfight consists solely of. Eventually, he takes his sword and rams it all the way into the bull´s back. The bull maybe lasts another minute, then either sits down or outright collapses. At this point, they take a dagger and mash it into the top of its head and wiggle it around to make sure it´s dead. Oh yeah, the whole time the bull gets stabbed at all, everybody cheers wildly. hehehe. After it´s over, they drag the bull out by way of two horses. Pretty, barbaric, no? Well, I had a good time, although my mom wasn´t so into it.

By Monday we´ve pretty much run out of things to do. They are still here today (Tuesday), and I´m struggling to think of what to do this afternoon and evening. We planned on seeing the archeological museum, but then after that it´s pretty much up in the air. They are gone early tomorrow for Barcelona, where they´ll have plenty to keep them occupied for 2 nights. Anyway, it was good to see them here, regardless of the lack of activities this time of year.

I´ve been feeling really good about my Spanish lately. I´m comprehending a whole lot more than before and finding it much easier to speak in a flowing manner. I´ve somehow managed to convince my brain to not worry so much about forming perfect grammatical sentences when I talk, and things have just starting coming out so much more easily. I feel as if (here comes a way over-used cliché) a levee is about to break and all the Spanish is starting to pour out. Having my parents here asking me what things mean or how to say phrases has made me realize I´ve actually retained. I also notice I don´t have to fish around for words in my dictionary nearly as often as before. It´s exciting to know that I have over two months more to improve before I´m gone.

So the rest of my week consists of a project and a test, and then midterms are next week. After that is Madrid and Valencia (for Las Fallas). I want to try to get another independent weekend trip in soon to Granada or some other not-too-distant Spanish city. It´d be cool to rent a car for this one so I can really take in the countryside and stop wherever it seems like a good place to do so. We shall see about that.

Well, this post didn´t end up as long as originally planned, but I need to be getting on with the day. It´s becoming a hell of a lot harder to keep this thing up to date with all the schoolwork I have and all the stuff I get into during the weekends.

I´ll try to have bullfight pictures up soon enough.

Adios for now