Continued Boom!

Sunday 1 March was reserved to visit Plaza Ajuntamiento and experience the first of nineteen daily 2pm firework presentations. Yes, 2pm every day until la Crema, the burning of the ninots, on the nineteenth. This is a big effing deal in Valencia - gunpowder is in the air they breathe here. I got to the Plaza at noon, and it was already crowded, but you could walk. I meandered off hoping to catch a sidewalk coffee, and by the time I returned at 1:30, it was wall to wall. You found your spot and didn't move from it, since you couldn't move. This is a 10,000 square meter open space, and it was teeming with humanity, all waiting for the show. Every few hundred feet or so, a community band of brass, reeds and percussion (maybe 5 or 7 musicians), fired up a tune that everyone knew the lyrics to (save me) and danced away. At 1:55pm, a warning blast was fired into the sky which was being dutifully patrolled by a Policia helicopter. At 2pm sharp, the big show began. Fireworks at night, it's mostly about the visuals. Fireworks during the day, it's all about the sonics. And for five incredible minutes, the sound built until toward the end, when I began to sense what it must be like to be in the middle of an artillery battle, a teenage girl three or four bodies in front of me captured the moment perfectly when she turned to her friend, jumped up and down with a glee she could barely contain and just screamed with exhilaration. It was visceral.