In July we decided to spend a day in Vitoria-Gasteiz, but once we got there we discovered it was a holiday so everything was closed. (This has happened to us several times now. It is impossible to keep up with the holidays because in addition to national holidays, which are found on the calendar, there are regional and even city holidays.)Anyway, we were initially disappointed but decided we could at least walk around and see the outsides of things. Before long we saw a girl dressed in complete Basque traditional costume carrying a Txistu (a Basque flute). David and I looked at each other and said, "Let's follow her." She lead us to the heart of the old part of the city where we found an increasing number of people in costume. Once we got to the city center the crowds were growing and the party was already starting to hop--small spontaneous parades, rockus music bands parading around in the streets, lots o
f drinking and lots garlic. Garlic?We found out later that it was a holiday called "El Dia del Blusa" and we figured out two things. First, for this holiday lots of people dress up in the traditional costume of their region. It was really interesting to see this because it wasn't just the small kids who dressed up. There were people of all ages dressed up and proudly. Here is one of my favorite photos from the day--dread-locked and smoking a cigarette (that looked and smelled, well, homemade),
but proudly wearing the whole costume down to the slipper/shoes whose laces criss-cross up the calf. I can't imagine a holiday in the US with people dressed up in traditional clothes, especially not bohemian college students. It was very fun to see.
The second thing that we discovered is that a big part of the holiday was the purchasing of a long stock of garlic. There were blocks and blocks (see Simon below) of garlic stands, one after another. As you can see from this picture people were very selective in making their purchases.
I love that in this photo there are 3 generations of a family checking out the garlic (2 sons, mom, grandpa). I don't know (wish I did) what they were looking for; every one of the garlic cloves was better than anything you'd find in a grocery store at home. The other interesting thing was onc
e the garlic was purchased it seemed to be the man's role to wear it on his shoulders because we saw quite a few men "sporting" their garlic around town.What fun discoveries we made that day! (This is a nod to the Chris Cutri style of happenstance travel. Hi Chris!)
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