Abroad in Spain: Travel Blog

A garbage can brims over as the Burgos Festivals come to an end.

My regular readers know that, over the last couple weeks, I have been writing a mini-series on the 2009 Burgos Festivals – the biggest party of the year in the city of Burgos.  To finish up the mini-series, I thought it would be appropriate to write this post about the tons of garbage that were produced (and needed to be cleaned up) as a result of the massive partying during festival week. 

For those of you who have never been to Spain before, let me tell you that Spaniards are known to party hard until the wee hours of the night and all this partying can sometimes leave behind “trace evidence” in the form of empty food containers, bottles, etc.  Judging from the amount of garbage in the container pictured above, the recent festival week in Burgos was no exception to the general “party all night long” rule.  Still, despite all the partying, we have to give the Spaniards credit for always cleaning up their mess afterwards.  Just take a look at the picture below to see what I mean. Continue reading this post…

I thought I would upload this short video to give you a look at one of the fireworks displays during the recent Festivals of Burgos.  There were fireworks every night for an entire week during the celebration and I was pretty impressed with the quality of the shows.  Of course, I should let you decide on the show quality for yourself after viewing the video.  Continue reading this post…

Members of a peña march in the parade with their instruments. The interesting thing was how these people kept themselves hydrated.

The fiestas of Burgos wouldn’t be complete without a parade — and there was a gigantic parade about halfway through the festival week that included clowns, street performers, marching bands, dancers, and even giant inflatable floats like the dragon one pictured below.  For the most part, the parade in Burgos was basically the same as any parade that I’m used to seeing in the USA; however, there was one slight difference in “hydration techniques,” so to speak.  Continue reading this post…

Spaniards enjoy an outdoor tapas booth during the festival.

Spaniards love to eat.  That was something that was reflected by the tapas stands set up throughout the city for the recent festivals of Burgos.  For those of you who don’t know what a “tapa” is, it’s basically a bite-sized portion of food served on a plate and usually accompanied by a small glass of wine or a cold draft.  Most of the time, you get tapas in bars; however, during the festivals of Burgos, stands like the one pictured above were placed all over the city streets and the bars served their tapas outside from these stands all week long. 

For me, having these stands on the street during the festivals gave people a really great chance to socialize.  Spaniards, of course, never spent too much time at any one stand; instead, they went from stand to stand to sample the wide variety of tapas.  As they were moving from stand to stand and sampling the wide array of “goodies” to eat, they ran into old friends and met new people.  It was really a great thing.  In fact, I loved the whole “tapas on the street” atmosphere during last week’s festival — I went with my friends to try the foods from the various bars and ran into a lot of people that I knew along the way and got to “catch up” with them.  Good food and good friends, what more could you ask for? 

For this post, I’d like to ask that you comment about your favorite tapa or Spanish food in general.  We’ll have to see if we can come up with one definitive “favorite” from Spain (I personally think coming up with one favorite will be hard to do).   Continue reading this post…

A man stands on the street with his mountainous pile of balloons for sale.

I really wish that I had had a bunch of balloons to sell during these past festivals in Burgos.  If I had sold balloons, I probably could have made enough money to retire right now at the ripe old age of 24.  As you can see from the photo above, one big part of the festivities were balloon vendors who “set up shop” in the middle of the street selling their goods to children passing by.  I think it was probably a pretty lucrative business — every child I saw who walked past these makeshift “balloon shops” wanted a balloon. 

I was talking with a friend of mine who has a young child about these balloon vendors and she told me that she just couldn’t afford to buy all the balloons that her daughter wanted every time they passed by.  Her solution was simple: she told her daughter that the balloons weren’t for sale — they were just for looking at.  It was a pretty clever solution if you ask me, as long as the child believed it.  In any event, I think I’m going to buy myself a large stock of balloons for next year’s festival — maybe afterwards I can use the money I earn to buy a Ferrari.  Continue reading this post…

French performers ride an ostrich and a large ball down the street at the Burgos Festivals.

All last week, the city of Burgos was in “festival mode.”  You see, last week was the famous “San Pedro y San Pablo” week in Burgos, the week in which the entire city is turned upside down by non-stop partying.  I spent the week taking pictures of the festivities and have decided to create a mini-series here on the blog to document all that happened.  This is the first installment of said mini-series with much more to come over the upcoming days. 

In this installment of the mini-series, I’d like to talk about something of utmost importance to the festivals: street performers.  It seemed to me that no matter where I went in the city last week, I somehow came in contact with a street performer ”out and about.”  Most of these performers wandered aimlessly throughout the city; however, some were assigned to particular streets.  In any event, the thing that surprised me most about these performers was the quality of their performances; in fact, it was obvious that these people were highly trained and had years of practice and thus their shows were nothing short of amazing — this wasn’t a homeless guy strumming a banjo on the street to earn a dime.  Continue reading this post…