Fiesta season's back again!

As the weather is getting better more and more people are going out into the streets and this mean that the street party season is back.
The fist one was Corpus Christi, a religious festivity (I'm not very Catholic myself so I don't have a clue as what's going on) that is somehow related to first communions. You could see children everywhere dressed beautifully, girls dressed in longs white dresses and boys dresses as dwarf admirals or Victorian style kid/sailors as you can see in this picture of one of the Spanish royal kid on his day.
There's been some debate in the media as how much money people spend on the whole thing and how what is supposed to be a spiritual event is now a new way to keep up with the Joneses. According with some surveys, people spend in average €5,000 in total, including the dresses for the kid and his/her parents, the fiesta, etc etc.
During the last weekend we had in Sabadell the fiesta de la tradición a party to celebrate all things traditional, and we saw the local two-headed dragon called Antonitot (picture here with his accompanying diables (devils), The dragon's mouths are fill with fireworks and he's taken into the street scaring people away. Here the guys from Health & Safety still don't rule the country, so the dragon goes around spitting real fire and loads of sparkles and people run away from him. One little spark came to rest inside my sandal, and believe me... it's real fire and it hurts!But is was worthy.

We also saw a most fantastic creature called the burricornio (a mix of the words burro, donkey, and unicornio, unicorn, something like a donkeycorn). Instead of spurting fire, the burricornio splash everybody with water from both ends and, of course, the children love this even more than the scary dragon. I do think that people run away faster from the burricornio and his cold water that from the sparkles of the dragon. Only it was so warm that the children run towards this funny creature with the most silly faced you can imagine, and they got soaked wet, of course. Pity that I was running and laughing so much that I don't have a single good picture of it!!

There were also the trabucaires. This is people dressed in traditional costume with the red berretina, the Catalan hat, carring a big old-fashioned gun (see picture) and actually shooting blank and very noisy shoots. From time to time they take some black powder and make a small pile on the floor and then shoot their guns at it, thus creating a small fire and a big white smoke. They even let some of the children pull the trigger of the guns when they finished, so they can see how the mechanism release the fire to fire the gunpowder (told you, no Health & Safety here to spoil the party). P was very impressed on how hard wast to pull the trigger and to think that people actually used to go to war with this things. In any case, it was VERY noisy,even though I tried to cover my ears, from time to time they caught me unprepared and my ears were ringing for hours afterwards.

After all that we all went to have some tapas and a nice ice cream before returning home. My dad even had a sangria with his tapas! My stomach was still not well, so I had neither the tapas not the ice cream but I enjoyed the day a lot.

I love my new town, we all do. Loads of things to see and do and not a tourist in sight.