Sunday 19 January 2014

Festival St Antoni

It’s amazing what you can get up to when you have absolutely nothing to do except focus on writing all day long, I mean you can make 24 hours go a very long way before you even set eyes on the laptop, never mind switching it on to actually…write.
And so it was that I found myself enjoying the company of some local residents of a near-by café who had very kindly invited me to celebrate the festival of St Antoni with them. How could I possibly say no, I have to stay in and write! I was out of the door in a shot.
It was very nice because earlier in the week I had visited the town of Sa Pobla on the day they were preparing for the festival and of course I had stupidly left my camera in the apartment. The town looked fantastic, the central square had the beginnings of a stage erected, with fridge-freezer sized speakers being hoisted into place, flags and decorations spread around the cafes, shops and restaurants that bordered us. What was most impressive, to my uneducated tourist surprise was the lengths to which the whole town seemed in on the fun. It was akin to Halloween or Guy Fawkes night back home. All the shops had devil icons everywhere, but not just little face-masks, there were enormous costumes, mannequins and dummies all made up to look the part. There was a striking giant sized devil perched atop the town square church overlooking proceedings, complete with pronged fork ready to strike down on those who were not taking part. There were large paintings on the town’s walls, stickers on shop windows and notices and signs everywhere. It looked like great fun and I wish I had some photos to share with you, I looked it up online and found these links if you want to take a look: http://bit.ly/1kNeEYc and http://bit.ly/LBY1PV .
As we were there just for a coffee and afternoon stroll, the night’s antics can only be imagined but I bet some of the town’s residents are still recovering from their hangovers now. As I didn’t see how it all went, it was with a great pleasure I accepted the invite to the local event, of course it wasn’t on the scale of an entire town, but it was wonderful none-the-less, intimate and with a tangible sense of community and family. The owner’s of the bar were extremely generous as they put on a bbq for all the guests and it was not a trifling amount, there were various local meats and a local salt free bread which helped hugely to contain the increasing unsteadiness I felt from the beer and gin…there were children dressed as little-devils running around, several generations of families sitting and standing around enjoying the food and drink, and most importantly for the theatrical nature of the night, a series of bonfires lit both for entertainment and for cooking.




I will leave you with a few snaps of the night, the steady-cam feature proving its worth as the evening progressed (now I realise why so many of my youth’s off the shelf-Kodak-disposable efforts resulted in blurry half images of pavements and empty skies…) and I think I can safely say that there will be no hesitation on my part to participate in any events such as this in the future, there is no regret in having this memory as opposed to staring blankly at a screen for several hours on a Saturday night.











And on it went..


Take care everyone,

RGR
www.thinkingplainly.com

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