The Ferria - Jaen style!

Last weekend I made my way to Jaen for their annual fair (La Ferria). It was a great excuse to go visit my favorite ladies who were placed in Jaen, see another city, and experience something completely Spanish.

Let me back up a bit. In Spain (or at least Andalucia), most cities/towns have an annual fair. In the past, they served much the same purposes as the fairs in the United States; the farmers came together to show off and sell their produce and livestock. But unlike the US where the fairs still have some semblance of the old pastoral traditions, no longer do Spanish fairs. Jaen's ferria struck me as a mix between the country howdown and and overflowing night in West Hollywood. There were the bumper cars and fun houses, cotton candy and expensive fair food, and many other typical fair fare all alongside rows and rows of tents set up for bars and dancing, each one a unique discoteca.

So like most other nightly happenings in Spain, we showed up to the fair after shortly after midnight when things were still quiet. After dabbling in some of the delectable food offerings, including filled churros, candied almonds, and patatas (um, there are always patatas), taking a bathroom break at an especially heinous bathroom, we finally found ourselves dancing away at one of the more popular tents, Mombasa. As the time rolled close to 3, we were pooped (as we usually do, we had intentions of staying out all night like the Spanish do), and we made it back to the apartment.

We made it back to the fair the next night to only be welcomed by large swarms of people that came to take part in the last night of the festivities. Being so overwhelmed by the numbers and the large amounts of trash and broken glass on the ground (trash cans become somewhat nominal at the fair), we decided to walk around once to see anything we missed the first night, eat again what we liked before, and dance to one last song, before calling it a night. As we were walking back at nearly 2am, it was as if we were salmon swimming upstream, and it was obvious that most people were making their way to the fair at that early hour. Near the Plaza del Torros, we found Jaen's botellon (the weekend sport for young adults that are essentially drunkenly protesting the recent "no drinking in public" law - get enough hords of people together and the police are too overwhelmed to care). Thousands of young Spaniards were gathered together to drink the night away before stumbling it off at the fair. It was by far one of the most overwhelming sites I've seen in Spain thus far, and not one that I was eager to participate in either.

That nights we fell asleep to the murmur of activity from the streets below of all those enjoying Ferria until the early morning hours. It was the end of the great weekend and a thorough cultural experience.