la Feria: one crazy week

I had a blast at la Feria last week. If you recall: Feria is a week-long festival that takes place on the Feria grounds - a big, open space with roads throughout. Around Feria, casetas (tents) are set up along the roads, so it ends up looking like a little village. Each caseta is owned/run by a group of people, and each person pays throughout the year to be a member. During Feria, these people can enter their caseta whenever they want and invite whomever they want. Inside the caseta it's like a little bar/restaurant.

Ana, a PhD student in my lab, is a member of a caseta; the original group of people owning this caseta all worked at the bank where her dad used to work. I was extremely lucky that she invited me to her caseta for Feria!

I first went Monday - the first night of Feria - where everyone dresses up (in normal clothes), eats pescaito frito (fried fish) for dinner, and sees the alumbrá (lighting up of the main entrance way and of the lights throughout the Feria grounds).

Lunes de pescaito, in Ana's caseta, with Ana and Juanjo from the lab and Ana's sister and her boyfriend

Tuesday and Wednesday I went the entire day, from afternoon until early morning. Starting Tuesday, all the women and girls wear their trajes de gitana (Feria dresses), and I got to wear a dress that Ana lent me and that her mom adjusted for me! The days consisted of sitting or standing around tables in the caseta, talking with friends of Ana (from the lab, from school, and her family), and getting up every once in a while to dance sevillanas or to take a walk around the Feria grounds. Basically the way it works is it's really hot, you're wearing a long heavy dress, and you dance sevillanas, so you're thirsty, so you drink glasses and glasses of rebujito (Manzanilla white wine mixed with 7-Up) since that's what you drink at Feria, and since you're drinking constantly, you eat constantly - I had so much Spanish food in just a few days! Pescaito frito, tortilla, croquetas, jamón, queso, aceitunas gordales, revueltos, lagrimitas de pollo, almendras fritas, montaditos...

With people from the lab

Again, sevillanas is the traditional folk dance that everyone dances at Feria. It's danced in partners, and the steps are set (ie you don't need to make up your own sequence of moves). Here is a Youtube video (wait 10 seconds) to give you an idea - it's a really fluid dance, with lots of arm movement, and can be really showy if you want. I had learned the steps from Ana in the lab and gotten some help from another Fulbrighter who's in Sevilla this year studying flamenco, so by the time I got to Feria I knew enough to be able to pick up the rest and dance pretty convincingly I think. In any case, everything came a lot easier in the atmosphere of the caseta, with the music, wearing the dress with the ruffles, with everyone else dancing, and with some rebujito.

Dancing sevillanas with Elena

This is probably the only festival I've been to where the absolute only objective is to have a good time and enjoy spending time with your friends and family, for hours and days on end. I think if I had just gotten to Spain and gone to Feria, I would have found it weird and overwhelming, but now that I've been in Spain for months...it all just makes a lot of sense.

And because you can only take so many days of the intensity of Feria, I went with some other people in the group to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a town on the coast in the province of Cádiz, for the rest of the week. We enjoyed hanging out at the beach, cooking at home, playing board games, going out, staying up late... so that made for one week of total, complete fiesta! (oh, with a day and a half of work thrown in somewhere in there, in true Spanish fashion. :)