Today I got my first good look at la Feria here in Zafra. It is rather amazing when you consider its history. It is the 559th fiesta de San Miguel; that means this celebration has been going on since the 1400s! I really wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. We studied la Feria in Seville in one of my Spanish classes, but one of my teachers had told me that it was only loosely similar. Basically, thus far, it seems that la Feria is a combination rodeo/state fair/bazaar/party (like club atmosphere)/carnival/Chinatown surprise (Emma & Chelsea, get the reference?). There are lots of booths where you buy anything ranging from mattresses to fur jackets to sausages & cheese to knives to agriculture equipment to children’s toys to artisan goods to practically anything else you could imagine. Competing with these are the infinite number of temporary restaurants and food vendors selling lots of Spanish food and hamburgers, which definitely seem to made with ham rather than beef here. Here are some examples of booths that I saw yesterday:
Probably more appealing to me were the animals. We didn’t get to see very many of them, and we didn’t see any of them do anything exciting (maybe today!), but I still loved them. We mostly got to see the cows (not black & white like my favorite, but still awesome) and the Iberian pigs, which are one of the things Spain is famous for. There are ginormous and black and still very cute, though they are not pink. At the same time, it makes me kind of sad knowing that most of them are grown so big only to be killed so that their humongous legs can be cured and eaten by some Spanish family. I know, such is the way of life, and I love chorizo, so I am not going to complain too much. But look at that cute, little (I mean, big) pig!
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