Jamie Fehr

January 6th is Three Kings day, January 6th is the day when all the good little boys and girls get to wake up and open presents and to commemorate the coming of that day, last Friday (Jan. 5th) night was the biggest parade of the year.

The sad news is, Kirsten beat me too it, she’s already already written an excellent report on the event which was going to be my big post for the week. She also beat me to the pictures as my camera died just when we got to the parade so you’re going to have to see the ones that she took. As a matter of fact the only thing that she really missed was the story of getting to the parade.

Last Friday night around 5 p.m. I left with some people from work to meet up with some spanish friends to catch a bus downtown to take in the evenings festivities. However upon arrival at the bus stop we waited 40 minutes only to have bus after bus jam packed full of people drive by and not pick up anyone at our stop.

What should we do? We couldn’t fit everyone in a car and it was too far to walk so the only logical solution was to find a new bus stop on a less busy line. So our good Spanish leader, Javi, took us for a walk where we encountered a barrage of people and just passed then was a bus stop.

There were just as many people waiting at this bus stop as the last one, I didn’t feel encourage at all, but within five minutes a nearly empty double sized bus pulled up. It felt a bit like a miracle. Anyway, we got downtown and were quickly able to find the rest of the group we were to meet and not long after finding a spot along the parade route the parade started. It was a spectacle to say the least and honestly if you were in Spain you would be foolish to miss it.

I guess now I know why Kirsten left that bit out. It was really lame, anyway in brief here’s what caught my attention about the parades:

• My very favorite part of the parade was the person standing on the persons shoulders standing on the persons shoulders who was walking the parade.
• The adults and middle aged people seemed to be at least as involved in collecting the candy that was thrown as the children and after the parade was over it wasn’t hard to find an adult walking in the street with a big plastic bag full.
• And oh yes, there was candy. The parade floats were nearly shoveling it onto the crowd. It was even more wild than farmers day back home.