vidagranadablog

If you decide to live on a beautiful plaza with one of the prettiest churches in all of Granada, you should be ready for two things:

1) Weddings

2) Festivals

I can’t begin to tell you how much fun this has made living in our particular apartment. Karen, in particular, loves weddings, and it seems nearly every weekend we get to see a new bride and groom taking pictures outside the church with family and friends. It’s quite a spectacular scene, and we can take all this in from the balcony off our living room.

The festivals are truly something to behold. October 12th was National Day in Spain, and it celebrates the day Columbus reached the Americas. In observance of the holiday, our kids didn’t have school, so we figured this was similar to Columbus Day in the US. We were wrong. In Spain, they don’t just close schools. They close streets. Buses stop running and restaurants close doors. And then the processionals begin. The clothes. The music. The floats on the shoulders of men. And more bombs bursting in air than we have ever seen. There isn’t one big fireworks celebration. It seems there are hundreds–not set in a giant field but rather in confined plazas. We watched from our balcony as firework after firework rocketed into the sky seemingly from behind buildings. The noise so deafening that you would have thought the explosions had taken place in our apartment.

To us, this level of celebration was unlike anything we had experienced before. However, we were informed by locals that this was merely an appetizer. “Just wait until Holy Week” they said.