Tuesday Oct. 12th was a national holiday in Spain. El dia del Pilar. We spent the holiday in Zaragoza because we heard they have a lot of festivities for it. It was pretty fun!! We woke up early in the morning to watch the procession of people "bringing flowers to Pilar." It seemed like pretty much the entire city dressed up in costumes, and processed around the city carrying flowers. They all brought the flowers to the main plaza in front of the Basilica named after Pilar and there was this HUGE metal structure, I guess you could kind of describe it like a christmas tree? Anyway they set all the flowers on the structure so it kind of looked like this enormous christmas tree made out of flowers. It was pretty cool.
people processing through the city in the rain.
my mom and i with poofy hair in the rain. you can see the structure for the flowers and the basilica behind us.
we went inside the basilica and it was huge and absolutely gorgeous. one of my favorite buildings we went into on the trip. you werent supposed to take pictures inside the church...woops! I took a few but not as many as I would have liked.
after the morning festivities we went to a few museums. entrance to the museums was fee that day because of the holiday so that was cool! zaragoza used to be an old roman city, ceasaragusta. So they have roman ruins which were pretty cool to go see. We went to a museum where they had roman ruins of the old city forum, where they did most of their business, living, daily life stuff. It was pretty cool.
We also went to a different museum that had the ruins of the old roman theater. pretty awesome. the museum had this little cafe where we had lunch that overlooked the ruins.
after all our educational sight seeing the city had a huge parade that went through town with music and dancing and more costumes. the kids all dressed up were my favorite.
this little kid was too freakin cute for words. he and his sister were dancing around having a blast!
this fine group of senior citizens were also in the parade and absolutely adorable. They were in the parade and every few minutes they would partner up and dance together.
the "christmas tree" almost all filled up!
There was also this little market/fair thing. We just couldn't resist trying the Spanish idea of "fair food."
they were selling baked potatoes and the toppings were definitely different. But we thought we'd be adventurous. We got a baked potato with tomato sauce, sour cream, carrots, green olives, corn, and cheese. It was seriously delicious!! So good! There were two things we didn't get on it...tuna...which sounded sick and ham...spaniards put ham on everything and frankly we were a little tired of it.
enjoying our potater!
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