"I wonder what the death rate is this week..."

Las fallas has commenced. Look out for the petardos (firecrackers).

Las fallas is a festival in Valencia which spans Monday-Friday. Actually, it goes on all year, but the main events are Monday-Friday. The city is divided into smaller groups and each group spends a ton of money and a

lot of effort to build these gigantic paper-machet sculptures. One of them wins a big prize and at the end of the week, and then they burn them all down. Every day (including the couple weeks prior to Fallas week), there is a mascletá in the Plaza de Ayuntamiento where fireworks are shot off at 2pm. Sounds weird, right? Well, it's not about the lights and the colors. It's all about the noise. And let me tell you, it's loud. I went with a group of friends today to camp out in the plaza to get front row for the mascletá. Granted, we got there a bit late and missed out on front row, but we were still really close. (Even as I'm writing this at 4:50am, there are fireworks going off. The city doesn't sleep.) Your whole body shakes. Its wild. They also have a castillo at night with the most amazing fireworks displays I've ever seen. They far surpass any show I've seen in the US.

There are stands all over the city that sell churros con chocolate (deep-fried goodness that you dip in a cup of melted chocolate). Streets are blocked off everywhere you go. People have tents set up in the streets where they cook paella and play music all night long. I'm not exactly sure when people sleep, though, because they stay up all night playing music and lighting petardos (firecrackers) and then in the morning they set off a bunch of firecrackers, called the despertá. Despertar means to wake up, so you can imagine the amount of noise they make with the fireworks.

There are stores where you can buy little poppers that you throw on the ground and they snap, or you can buy bigger firecrackers. There is a list posted on the wall of the age restrictions on them, but there may as well not be any restrictions because the kids take over the streets and throw sparking firecrackers at each other. There are some that make an insanely loud noise when they explode and it's really popular for kids to throw them down and then run away. You can't escape them. They are everywhere.