24 Sept 2011

Here we are back from a jolly week with friends Dave & Lucia in Sodom-sur-Mer ( Sodon-by-the-Sea .. shows up as Sitges on your map), an active beach community a 40-minute train ride south of Barcelona.  Yes, really ... I haven't seen so many shaved heads since the Bald is Beautiful convention in Ottawa in 1973... but never mind, there's nothing wrong with it, they say.

 One strange thing we found was people paying to have fish nibble their toes &/or spit something at them, depending of which advertising you believe.  What will they think of next!
 We were sitting near the beach with a memorial jug of sangria when this guy came along.  We said - "Wow, that must be Jack Nicholson!"  but he turned out to be a lot taller.
Stay tuned, there's more to come.
 Saturday morning saw us in Barcelona for a walking food tour which started at a 'granja' - a small cafe-style place where locals have breakfast (one of the five meals a day).  This particular one invented 'cacaolat ' - chocolate milk,  in 1931.  They still use the same receipt and label.  We found it much richer and tastier than any chocolate milk we remembered.
 Then on to a bakery still housed in their original building.

 Lots of imagination here - cakes that look like burgers ....

 and others like hats.
 They have perfected a process of surrounding a mint leaf with chocolate!  An idea whose time has come!

They weren't the only ones selling goodies, in the market there are mountains of candy.
And a strange display of things not edible.
The 50th annual Wine Harvest Festival was held in Sitges the weekend we arrived and part of the fun involved a grape stomping contest.  Teams were given baskets of grapes, which had to be lifted into the stomping barrel, then stomped to the max and the juice collected and poured into a graduated container. The winner was the team who produced the most juice and got to pelt the others with hands full of mushed grapes.

We were busy eating and drinking to excess and so didn't arrive early enough to be close to the action, so mostly saw flying must.


We were lucky to find the opening of the Santa Tecla festival in Sitges Thursday evening.  We didn't understand much of what was happening but it was colourful.  There were giants, dragons shooting fireworks, pipe and drum bands, male and female stick dancers, and guys dressed in decorated potato  sacks setting off more fire crackers.  It seemed that the whole town was participating and many shops covered their windows against who knows what kind of damage.  Friday was a holiday and it looked like it would be a three-day party.




Re-loading the dragon.
 Many of the guys smoked cigars and used them to light the fire crackers.

 Fire breathing dragon.
 The giant king and queen.
 some recognizable characters.


Some not so recognizable.

I don't normally take photos of other peoples' art, that's not a photographer's job, but I was struck by this simple memorial to the Franco years when so many were behind bars.

The other Sitges beach.

Remembering a film festival.