Día de La Cruz

So last Thursday was Día de la Cruz (Day of the Cross)!  Last Thursday was perhaps one of my favorite cultural experiences ever.  Besides Tuesday's Bull Fight, which was also a pretty awesome cultural experience.  Last week was just full of culture for me, I felt pretty awesome.

So Día de La Cruz is basically just a holiday that they have in a few places in Spain, Granada obviously being one of them.  The day is mostly celebrated in Andalusia so it's pretty specific to the region.  Basically, it's a holiday where people make crosses out of usually flowers, metal, wood, pillows, anything they feel like, and enter it in a contest.  They are spread out all over the city and are usually put in rooms.  There's more than just a cross there too, it's a whole spread with a theme.  So a lot of them have flamenco dresses around them, some instruments, sometimes food, chairs, all sorts of stuff.  They are absolutely gorgeous and everyone in the city goes around to look at them.  They also put an apple at the bottom of it with a pair of scissors stuck in them.  They use that as a play on words because an apple is also called a pero here, and when the judges go around and judge the crosses, or people go around and look at them they say "well I like this one, but..this one has this..."  In case you don't know pero means but.  So by putting an apple with scissors at the bottom of the piece they want you to cut out the but when talking around their cross.  It's a cute thing, it makes sense if you know Spanish I guess...

So anyways, me and about 5 others decided to meet up in the afternoon and walk around to see the crosses all around the city.  Here's some pics of what we saw!

Cute girls dancing

Right when we walked into Plaza de Carmen we saw a crowd around these cute little girls dancing in their flamenco dresses in the Plaza.  They had a stage all set up and were playing Spanish music.  People walk around the entire city in flamenco dresses.  All day long we saw little kids, young girls, teens, older girls, and even some older women in flamenco dresses or with flowers in their hair.  It was awesome, and it so made me want a flamenco dress to walk around in.  If I was handed one I'd so walk around in a flamenco dress. 

One of my favorites

This was the just one of many crosses that we saw.  You knew where there were crosses mainly because there were a ton of people in one spot.  Also, they had the doors open of all the places where there was a cross.  Sometimes there was a sign on the door, but most of the time you could tell.  I liked this one a lot ,it was really pretty.

This one was right near the CLM, my school.  There was a restaurant right outside that was playing music and selling drinks a tapas, so there were a lot of people over here too.

This one was one of my favorites.  I loved all the food, and the whole space was covered with stuff for the cross.  The whole space was decorated and it was so festive. :)

 After walking around the city center we decided to go up to the Albaicin.  They usually have really pretty crosses, so we saw a few on the way up there and made our way to Plaza Larga where we encountered this.  It was a giant crowd of people in the plaza surrounding the cross and setting around it.  It was so busy, they had kids dancing, it was so festive!  I loved it, but it was super crowded and a bit rainy.  So we stayed a bit to enjoy the atmosphere and then made our way back down towards the city center.

I decided to go back to Plaza De Carmen where they had the stage set up to watch some of the girls dancing.  So I ended up staying there for about 2 hours until it was dinner time and headed back home.  But I got in the spirit and had so much fun.  They had really super cute little girls dancing in their little flamenco dresses, and they had older girls too.  The older girls were really good, and the little kids were adorable because they were so happy to be up there and weren't really quite sure what they were doing.

This is a video of one of the younger girls groups.  They were old enough to take it seriously then, so it was cute and fun to watch.

Cute little girls

This is a picture of the adorable little girls who made me smile and laugh.  The little girl on the right side reminded me of Teresa from Real Houswives.  She also had the most confused look on her face for every single dance, the entire time.  Her nose got all scrunched up and squinted her eyes.  Abby and I just laughed the whole time.  It was adorable.

Here's a video of the older girls dancing.  I think their instructor was up there with them too.  They were really good.  I watched two or three main groups dance and it was so much fun.  I was so happy I went out and explored the city.  It is definitely one of my favorite holidays in Granada and I felt so Spanish.  It definitely made me realize how much I'm going to miss Spain when I finally do leave.  Only here you can experience something like this. The rest of the videos of all the flamenco dancing I saw is right HERE.  Click there to look at about 4 other videos I took.  :)

So that was my Día de La Cruz.  It was a ton of fun.  Next post...Portugal!!

Until next time.  Love you all!!! <3