Posted by Chris Showers on July 13th, 2009.
 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…
Posted by Chris Showers on July 7th, 2009.
 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…
Posted by Chris Showers on July 7th, 2009.
 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…
Posted by Chris Showers on June 18th, 2009.
 Some young musicians perform during Youth Music Week in Burgos. That’s right, this week was the “Caja Círculo” sponsored “Youth Music Week” here in Burgos. That means that all week long “Caja Círculo” stages were being put up and taken down around the city and various young artists were scheduled to perform on them. It was really an interesting sight — as I was walking through various sections of the city, I got to be “serenaded” by the many young musicians. Of course, some of their music was a little too “heavy” for my taste (by “heavy” I mean head banging, screaming at the top of your lungs noise)… but that’s ok.
This is one thing that I like about Spain: there’s always a cultural “something” to do and usually that “something” is free or low-cost. Of course, in this case, head banging teens screaming lyrics at the top of their lungs wasn’t really my “cup of tea,” but still, it’s cool that this event was held in the city. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on May 3rd, 2009.
 Traditional dances from around Burgos. Ok, maybe the style of dance pictured above isn’t exactly what C & C Music Factory had in mind when they came out with the song “Everybody Dance Now” in the 1990′s; but, it’s still pretty cool. The above picture is actually of a traditional dance group from one of the small “pueblos” near Burgos. You see, since this weekend was a festival weekend (Labor Day), there were some special events in the city of Burgos — and one of those events consisted of this dance group performing traditional dances around the city streets.
I have seen this type of dance before in Burgos during various festivals, yet I never tire of it. It’s really interesting to me to see how well-choreographed the movements are, how meticulously detailed the dresses are, and how well-timed the music is (for those of you who don’t already know, the music usually consists of drums, a flute or two, and the dancers’ castanets). It’s obvious that these people spend a lot of time rehearsing and preparing for their shows and that they are proud of what they are doing – after all, for them this is a part of their heritage (each town/city/village has its own set of dances that are “passed down” through the generations). Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on May 1st, 2009.
That’s right, today was Labor Day in Spain and, oddly, they celebrated it by not laboring. In fact, everything was closed today in observance of the holiday: local bakeries, banks, convenience stores, and even large chain stores.
Personally, I’m still trying to get used to the concept of “festivals” in Spain. You see, here there is always some type of celebration/holiday and all of them are observed by the country essentially “shutting down” for the day: the shops close, the busses run on “holiday” schedules which means they have worse frequency, and you generally can’t even buy a loaf of bread. In a way, I guess it’s good that people here use the holidays as a time to be at home resting with their families; however, I can’t help but think that maybe there are some times that the whole “holiday rest” thing is taken a little overboard. Continue reading this post…
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