Street Life

Street life in Barcelona is everywhere and it's one of the best things about the city, and Spain in general. The photos show just a couple of the huge number of festivals that have happened since we've been here. Dia de San Jordi, where the city is full of yellow and red striped book stalls and rose stands is one of the biggest ones. We haven't even got to Castells, where people create human towers with four to five levels of people standing on each others' shoulders in the town square.

We stumbled across the girls doing Catalan dancing whilst walking up Carrer Gran de Gracia. The street was closed for traffic (there were a few militant drivers attempting to circumvent the people, but one driver was shouted at by an old man with a stick and the right of people to celebrate in the streets was restored.) The giant people who have swallowed the wrong potion, like Alice in Wonderland outcasts, are a lurking presence in Barcelona. There is a museum for them in the Gothic quarter, and they made an appearance at this market festival on San Pere Bai de Baix. They are called 'gigantes y cabezudos', 'giants and big-heads' in Catalan.Their heads are papier-mache and they parade through town under the control of a puppet master with a harness on their shoulder to make the giant gyrate. The figures are normally archetypes of traditional figures, the odd couple above look like peasants rather than nobility. 

To get back to the theme of festivals and street celebrations, they feel like an important part of life here. Every barrio has it's own festival. The Barceloneta festival featured parades with samba drumming and dancing with people wearing strange ship themed carnival hats made out of what looked like wooden oar parts. The festival with the giants was a barrio getting together and deciding to move the shops outside for a few days, and felt like an excuse to chat on the street and make time pass more slowly. I'm thinking about death at the moment, and feeling really sad because my lovely uncle Shaun has died. It's nice to live in a city where people are very noisily (a little too noisily sometimes for my refined English sensibilities!) making the most of the business of life by maximising the communal activities in the street, and injecting life with loud, argumentative conversation, music and colour. I hope this is a memory from Barcelona that stays with me forever.