9 d’Octubre Valencia, as interpreted by a clueless American
Loud, that’s what. It’s loud.
If you’d like to discover the official version of Valencian Community Day, see here. I am just interpreting what I saw, based on little knowledge of either the language or the history. [Addendum: I completely misinterpreted what I read and had to go back and adjust; I really didn’t know what was going on.]
We decided to see what the whole October 9th thing is about by wandering to the city center and standing around where all the people, metal barriers, and cops were posted up. Just to be clear, I had already blown it by this time. You see, the holiday was on a Sunday this year, which means there is no last-minute shopping. October 9th also happens to the saint day for St. Dionysius, which plays out kinda like Valentines day, involving giving your sweetie Mocadoràs, or little packages of marzipan figures. I don’t actually know what they look like or if they’re tasty, cause I put it to last minute, then promptly forgot. No. Shopping. On. Sunday.
So we decided to find the celebrations. As I understand it, this dates back to the 13th century and involves King James/Jaime and the welcoming Christians after kicking out the Moors. It turns out the festivities would be easy to find if you were blind, cause they blow up massive fireworks (sounding more like cannon fire) to announce the start of show. Early festivities include a very quiet, very far away marching band playing some songs, followed by cramming the entirety of the Valencian community into a plaza and along a short parade route, and a fair bit of standing around.
Following that, rumors of the parade start circulating, whereupon various members of the packed crowd decide they must be on the other side of the plaza from wherever they started. Metal barriers are rearranged, several older Spanish men recreate an obscure tale of battle over the placement of said barriers, and the crowd generally grows to fill the entire area.
At this time, each level of policia — policia local, policia civil, policia nacional — wander the blank space where the parade will soon be. This represents the unrest of the people before the founding of this current (800 year??) comunidad de Valencia. The crowd plays their part by grumbling somewhat and continuing to flow in a kind of brownian motion with subtle hints of currents among them. Each and every native Valenciano must find a police officer and politely ask them if they can walk up the parade route to get out of the crowd, only to be turned away. The symbolism is palpable.
A modern addition to the celebration is a circling helicopter and video drones. This becomes important later when the king (?) tries to blow them out of the sky with fireworks.
Finally, the procession made it around the parade route to where we had ended up standing. We saw a groups of people dressed in something resembling period garb — extremely opulent clothes meant to represent peasantry. The first group was playing terribly piercing, slightly out of tune recorders / mini-oboes (?) and a drum. There were also two — count ’em — two black people who I suppose represented the Moors; however, they marched with the parade, not against it. I don’t really know.
Several rows of these folks walked past — a few with music, some just in fancy clothes — and then came the traditional march of the bankers. That’s what I assume it was. There were lots of guys in very nice business suits, some of whom got claps from the crowd. A group of about five people carried in a huge Valencian flag on a standard, with four draped cords around them. So one guy was lugging this big heavy stick, with four other people keeping the draped cords off the ground; more symbolism, perhaps? More people clapped, though it was unclear whether that was for the standard bearers or the suited guy among them. Either way, policia nacional in heavy gear and carrying riot helmets were stalking around the edges of these groups. I assume the number of cops roughly represents either how important or how unpopular these folks are. By that math, we definitely saw the king or a really big jerk among the bankers.
Once these folks passed — there were several cadres of them — it appeared that the parade was over. However, nobody left their stations. After several more minutes, clapping began from the opposite direction. A representation of all the policia groups marched the parade route backward, disappearing from view. I have decided this represents the traditional abandonment of the bankers and politicos, leaving them to be eaten by the crowd, if we so wished. Roughly ten minutes later, the policias returned; gotta eat fast, I guess.
The wait became somewhat more expectant again, plus the riot helmets went on, so I assumed it was time to clear out. I was wrong. Another round of cannon fire announced that the festivities were really kicking off. After that, the fireworks started going airborne, which definitely caught the drone pilots by surprise. What followed can only be described as pointless, smokey, and loud; pointless, because we were standing in bright daylight and lighting off hundreds of fireworks; smokey because they were mostly ground-based and we were standing in an urban plaza, surrounded by tall buildings; loud, because see smokey.
The Spanish seem to like their celebrations loud. Understand that when I say hundreds of fireworks, I want you to assume that’s hyperbole, then know that you’re wrong. It might have been thousands — booming, cracking, screeching, pointless daytime fireworks.
I guess King James/Jaime did his thing a long time ago and people celebrated it. As I understand, our current Valencian flag dates from that time, so that’s kinda cool. Other than that, the symbolism was mostly lost on me, and I learned something important — wear earplugs to Spanish parties.
