Not knowing any Spanish when going to Spain isn’t always a big problem. One day we were just hanging out in a square in Madrid when a band starting lazingly playing some songs. We didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on in that part of the square until an explosion went off. They were fireworks, which were being set off by a bunch of weird clownish guys (one on stilts with a big water gun). They got a nice crowd built up, yelled all sorts of things in Spanish, freaked out small children, danced around, doused the hot crowd in water and then started to tell people to follow them around the square in such basic wording that even I understood it.

Continued tomorrow…