La Tamborrada

Today, January 21st marks the recovery day from the 24 hour festival that is La Tamborrada. Every year the city all celebrates the Patron Saint, San Sebastian for an entire 24 hours. Saturday at midnight the city crowds in a square in the old part of town and watches the flags being raised. For the next 24 hours the band of drummers march through the city. A band of children also have a performance for their families. Everyone in town dresses up or grabs something to drum, whether it was a big bucket, or a flat piece of wood.
This whole week we heard the drummers practicing. One of our roommates saw a drummer mess up during practice and start crying in the street. Apparently messing up during la tamborrada is not taken lightly. Being woken up by the drums each morning at 8:00 was not ideal but today we finally got to sleep in with absolutely no drums in the vicinity.
All our teachers, intercambios, and USAC directors told us that the 24 hour festival would be tiring and to make sure to prepare. On Saturday we slept in, lounged around, napped and slowly got ready trying to prepare for the festival. We are not allowed to have people over to our apartment, mostly because here in Spain social events are not usually inside the home like in America. Today was a generally loud day so we decided this was the one day we could get away with it. A group of USAC kids and a few locals hung around our flat for a few hours before the festival began. With our echoing apartment our "party" was really loud. We also did not have enough cups for everyone or nearly enough Fanta! Everyone drank all of Tara's limon fanta and we couldn't find anymore at any of the stores. At 11:30ish we all trekked to the square near our apartment. It was pouring rain so everyone in the square had their umbrellas up. We couldn't see anything that was going on but basically they played music, the whole town sang, and they raised the flags. After the ceremony everyone goes from bar to bar and socializes with the rest of the city. It was super crowded everywhere we went. We couldn't even get into some places the lines were so long. We ended up getting pizza at a really yummy place at one point of the night and lost and refound our friends many times. From midnight to 5 am everyone in our apartment came in and out at different times. It rained harder and harder as the morning progressed and even the locals told us to go home. We all slept in until the afternoon as more drums woke us up. The group of drummers walked past our street and through the rest of the city for the rest of the day. Our apartment was pretty dirty and we had a lot of dishes to do so for about an hour all five of us swept, mopped and scrubbed the heck out of our apartment. When we finally felt like our apartment was liveable, we went to lunch at a restaurant near the boulevard. It was sort of like a diner and had a bunch of American license plates, including one from Idaho. 8B, does anyone know what county that is from?  Our roommates got burgers, Tara got a really good chicken sandwich and I got a ham, egg and cheese sandwich. They were all really delicious and we drank some coca-cola with it. After that we hung out for a few hours and then around 7:00 we decided to get out of the house. It was a nice non rainy night so we walked around the city. Around 9:00 a bunch of USAC kids were going to meet at Molly Malones, the Irish Bar that the Americans hang out in to watch the American football games. It took awhile for most of the people to show up but once they did it was pretty fun watching the game together. There is not a really good area for a large group of people to sit and watch so we were all split up into groups. At 11:30 we left with our friends, Spencer and Lauren back to the square in the old part to watch the closing ceremonies. It wasn't raining this time so the sky wasn't filled with umbrellas and we could actually see the stage. They drummers played songs and the locals sang and at one point the kids in front of us actually pushed the crowd all the way over to one side during part of the song, sang a few more words then shoved them all back to the original spot. It was really funny, but also scary because they almost took Tara with them. The flag lowering ceremony took about ten minutes and the locals kept singing and jumping around for who knows how long after we left. The four of us went back to Molly Malones to watch the next football game. We left at half time to go to bed, which was at about 2:00 in the morning. Most of the USAC crew is excited for the Super Bowl, even though we will have to go watch it at 3:00 in the morning on a school night.

Today we slept in, walked around town and down by the beach and are currently doing our pile of homework. This week we are going to research places to travel and make our plans, have a meeting with the directors about teaching English, and get our bus pass.

Adios,
Tara and Taryn!