What a crazy day.
The day began around midnight when Melissa and I decided to follow the sounds of massive explosions – I mean explosives – outside the Pension. Christian had called us giving us a heads up about what was going on at the beach. Apparently, there was a huge party going on ON the beach. For what? I have no idea, but it seemed to be something related to the history of Guardamar or some kind of annual festival or ritual perhaps. But anyway, it was intense! I have never seen so many young people in Guardamar; they all seemed to come out at night and flock to the shores of the beach. Where have they all been hiding? We didn’t intend on staying very long; we just wanted to satisfy our curiosity.
Once we got down to the beach where an enormous bonfire was, we started looking for everyone else in studio. We eventually found that on the sand all huddled together dancing in a small circle they formed. There was a DJ, flashing lights, fireworks… everything! Everyone seemed to be having a great time haha. I eventually joined in the circle and started dancing to the one or two songs I really, really knew. It was a lot of fun!
Oh, by the way, since we arrived later than everyone else Melissa and I had take part in a ritual of going around the bonfire once, throwing sand into the fire three times, and “purifying ourselves” by walking through the water on the shore. We were told it was good luck. Awesome. One thing about these parties in Spain: People do whatever, and I mean WHATEVER, they want.
Anywho, we left at around 2am and got back to get some sleep at the Pension. We slept for however long we did and went to studio the next morning. Remember those really beautiful floats that were in Alicante? Well, they were burned today. That’s right. BURNED. Apparently, whenever these floats are made it is a tradition for them to be lit on fire and burned at midnight. Today was that day. It was a big deal and ended up becoming yet another city party. Since Alex knew that many of us were planning on going to Alicante for the celebration of burning the floats, he let us out a bit earlier than usual so we could have time to catch the bus to get there. We were able to catch the 8:05pm bus.
The rest of the night was history. A long history.
Just about everyone from studio went together, aside from a couple of people or so, so it was a good time. We arrived in Alicante a little after 9pm and tried to kill some time before midnight. Some of us ate or took pictures while others filled up on drinks. We walked around Alicante for a bit until we found one float where we were able to get a really good viewing spot for. We grabbed one of the best spots at around 11:15pm and stayed put until midnight, anxiously waiting to see the float burn. It was crazy because the firefighters that were present were spraying the adjacent buildings with water even before the float burning started; this was to make sure that the nearby buildings would not catch on fire. This was the last preparation before the float was burned.
The burning of the entire float took about fifteen minutes or so, maybe twenty. Either way, that beautiful float burned like nothing. The fire consumed the float in no time. There were pretty cool fireworks and a whole bunch of orange glowing ash flittering in the night sky and falling down upon us. It almost looked like fireflies. I held the camera up to my face and recorded most of the burning to shield the scorching heat from my eyes.
What happened soon after was completely unexpected but absolutely perfect. The people in the crowd started provoking the firefighters with the hoses yelling, “Agua! Agua! Agua!” and do you know what the firefighters did? No, they did not just raise the hose into the air and lightly sprinkle everyone. Oh no, they didn’t. They took the hose and directly sprayed water at the crowd with impressive pressure. Several times. At first we all ducked trying to cover our bags, at least I was. But after they continued to spray us, we gave up and stood there soaking wet at nearly 1am, defeated by the water hose. My shirt was so drenched it’s not even funny and my socks and shoes were as soggy as soggy cereal. It was so crazy, dude – but it was a great way to end the celebration.
Okay, so the rest of the night after that was quite crazy, let me tell you.
Minus this craziness (it was definitely an experience), the night ended amazingly. A group of us went to a dance club and ended up dancing until they played the last song at 5am. It was so much fun! Dancing with friends all night long has got to be one of the best things you can do haha. Oh, I should mention why we were in Alicante so late! Simple: We didn’t want to pay for a cab ride back to the Pension and there were so buses running late at night. So, we had to stay up all night until we could catch the 7:15am bus back to Guardamar.
We did it!
Once it neared 7am, we slowly walked to the bus station and passed out on the whole bus ride back to Guardamar. Everyone was so tired haha. It was great. It was as if I closed my eyes for one moment and we were already back in Guardamar. We definitely had a long night so we all finally went to bed around 8am.
Melissa and I slept for a few hours before getting up to start another beautiful day.
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