Back at it.
After Madrid came Sebulcor. Nobody in Spain has heard of this tiny pueblo in the Castille Y Leon region. It’s rural, yet hosts a small but successful tourism industry. Our stay in an inn across from endless wheat fields was relaxing. Delicious food and cool evenings defined our stay. A tranquil kayaking day on a emerald green river surrounded by cliffs inhabited by hundreds of vultures was fantastic by itself. Add to it the ruins of a 800 year old monastery perched on the rivers edge and you have yourself a pretty fine day.
And then came the candles. We took a bus to a nearby town called Pedraza. The town is a medieval village that has been meticulously kept for centuries. The walls and castle are well preserved and the narrow streets allow you to lose yourself for just long enough to forget that anything else in the world exists. Oh yeah, and the entire town turned every light and lined its windows, sidewalks and streets with candles. Thousands of candles. Some were in designs, others just decorated terraces and waist high walls. Speakers were strategically placed throughout the town playing classical music.
I took a group of 8 students on a wandering walk through the village. There were thousands of Spaniards also meandering the streets. We only came across two American all evening. I turned a corner to encounter a large crowd gathering. We pressed up to the front only to see a dozen military officers dressed in camouflage standing next two five cannons. Let’s not call them canons, but rather the type of modern weapon one might use to rouse Qaddafi from a bunker deep below a fortress in Tripoli. A 17 year-old student of mine quickly identified the music playing as Tchaikovsky’s Overture of 1812. We waited…and waited. Then, seemingly when we thought it wouldn’t happen, the cannons exploded. Fire, smoke…and the sound. We were standing no more than 10 feet from the closest cannon. The warm air seemed to blow us back several feet. The noise was deafening. The ringing in my ears subsided only for a moment until more cannon blasts. Our faces teemed with excitement drawn from the adrenaline. It was a feeling hard to describe, but somehow through that incident the nine of us bonded that evening. Candles and cannons. Go figure.
[...] Candles and Canons [...]