Pre-Mercé

Today is the big day – the beginning of the Mercé. The big stuff doesn’t start until tomorrow, but here’s what we’ve got so far. As a slight bit of context here, the Mercé was originally started as a religious festival (something about the patron saint of Barcelona and a plague of locusts), but how fireworks, dragons and hip-hop tie in with that is anybody's guess.

First, we hung out for a little while with the president of Catalonia. Today, as always, the Mercé kicked off with political speeches and demonstrations. After the final speech, we headed toward the sound of music in front of the Barcelona cathedral, passing by a march demanding freedom for the imprisoned members of the government of Catalonia who supported the secession referendum. Those imprisoned leaders don't include the president, who fled to Belgium right after the vote. Left without a president, the territorial government elected a substitute – Quim Torra.

Anyway, we arrived at the cathedral to find a big band playing traditional music and people from the crowd dancing a traditional dance. A well-dressed middle-aged man hopped into the circle in front of us and we noticed two guys with earpieces, form-fitting suits and gun-shaped bulges in their blazers staring into the crowd. When the dance was over everyone was high-fiving and shaking hands with the guy and I asked a woman near me who he was. “Oh, he’s Quim Torra, the president,” she said.

And here’s a video of the march and the dance. You can see President Torra getting into the circle right at the end.

But enough of the serious stuff, here are some other videos from tonight. First, the projections on the building. Best thing ever. There’s a different one every year. This is an excerpt from this year.

What time is it? Street food time, where we had some great snacks with Lebanese
fireworks on the beach in the background.












And no evening is complete without the parade of the spark-shooting monsters and the neighborhood drum corps. We gave it about an hour and it showed no sign of ending so we left and went to the park. The video is a little long, but do you really have that much else to do right now? You'll have to imagine the smell of singed hair.

It’s possible that there may have been some alcohol involved.

And then we went back to our place. The young people hanging out at the restaurants and bars on our block at 1:30 a.m. were as lively as they were at 8:00 p.m., and as we were 30 years ago.