Watching a very young child clamber up the backs of a human construction some fifty feet high to the accompaniment of a raucous orchesta of various reeded instruments is an odd experience.
I have to say that every time I see groups of castelleres making their castells I find it a rather moving experience.
These human towers are constructed using people standing on each others shoulders and these structures sometimes have up to ten levels!
The top two levels are where the children come in. One child known as an aixecador makes his, or in my experience her, way to the top of the tower and then awaits the second child known as the enxaneta. The enxaneta climbs on top of the aixecador and raises his or her right hand which is the sign that the castell has been contstructed. The completion of the castell does involve the successful dismantling of the structure as well without its collapsing.
For more information you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell but reading about the process does not give you an idea of what it is like acually being there.
On the face of it this activity is absolutely pointless and dangerous with the added suspicion that sending a small child to the top of a rickety column of people smacks of child abuse!
If you would like to stop and think about how many of your activities could be summed up by the two adjectives “pointless and dangerous” then you will rapidly discover that many of the more interesting diversions of the human animal can be dismissed with those two words. Sport, sex and sunbathing (to take but three starting with the letter ‘S’) could certainly be covered!
So, we will ignore the obvious idiocy of the activity and concentrate instead on the more positive aspects.
All Catalans I have met take a defensively nonchalant attitude towards the building of castells and treat the successful completion and dismantling of a high castell with the same respect and enthusiam as they would give to a well scored goal in football.
The musical accompaniment with the traditional instruments and the fact that the enxaneta is supposed to raise four fingers as a symbol for the four bars on the Catalan flag gives some idea of the nationalistic feeling that is present when the castells are built and perhaps gives some basis for the sight of the rising column of people being a representation of a national group rather than merely a quaint custom produced by odd folk.
For the column of people to rise there has to be support and, at the base of the structure, this support is a whole mass of people whose combined effort ensures the solidity of the whole. The people involved are not all trained athletes (through training and practise there certainly is) and the sheer ordinariness of the participants is strangely uplifting.
It may be, of course, that I am merely exhibiting my more romantic side. Or indeed just wrong. Time and understanding the country in which I now live will tell.
Meanwhile our joint life as the unemployed is about to start - though the idea of forming an EFL school is a real possibility and one which deserves some serious consideration during the summer.
My visit to the lawyer is still some days away so I have time to try and understand the tickets allocation system for the opera for next season. The Liceau offers various packages, none of which include all the operas, but do include other concerts that I do not necessarily want to attend. The total cost for a decent seat with a reasonable view is astonishingly large, but if you look on it as a year’s worth of entertainment then I suppose it becomes a little more reasonable. But it’s a lot of money to pay out all in one go!
And I’m unemployed!
I have to say that every time I see groups of castelleres making their castells I find it a rather moving experience.
These human towers are constructed using people standing on each others shoulders and these structures sometimes have up to ten levels!
The top two levels are where the children come in. One child known as an aixecador makes his, or in my experience her, way to the top of the tower and then awaits the second child known as the enxaneta. The enxaneta climbs on top of the aixecador and raises his or her right hand which is the sign that the castell has been contstructed. The completion of the castell does involve the successful dismantling of the structure as well without its collapsing.
For more information you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell but reading about the process does not give you an idea of what it is like acually being there.
On the face of it this activity is absolutely pointless and dangerous with the added suspicion that sending a small child to the top of a rickety column of people smacks of child abuse!
If you would like to stop and think about how many of your activities could be summed up by the two adjectives “pointless and dangerous” then you will rapidly discover that many of the more interesting diversions of the human animal can be dismissed with those two words. Sport, sex and sunbathing (to take but three starting with the letter ‘S’) could certainly be covered!
So, we will ignore the obvious idiocy of the activity and concentrate instead on the more positive aspects.
All Catalans I have met take a defensively nonchalant attitude towards the building of castells and treat the successful completion and dismantling of a high castell with the same respect and enthusiam as they would give to a well scored goal in football.
The musical accompaniment with the traditional instruments and the fact that the enxaneta is supposed to raise four fingers as a symbol for the four bars on the Catalan flag gives some idea of the nationalistic feeling that is present when the castells are built and perhaps gives some basis for the sight of the rising column of people being a representation of a national group rather than merely a quaint custom produced by odd folk.
For the column of people to rise there has to be support and, at the base of the structure, this support is a whole mass of people whose combined effort ensures the solidity of the whole. The people involved are not all trained athletes (through training and practise there certainly is) and the sheer ordinariness of the participants is strangely uplifting.
It may be, of course, that I am merely exhibiting my more romantic side. Or indeed just wrong. Time and understanding the country in which I now live will tell.
Meanwhile our joint life as the unemployed is about to start - though the idea of forming an EFL school is a real possibility and one which deserves some serious consideration during the summer.
My visit to the lawyer is still some days away so I have time to try and understand the tickets allocation system for the opera for next season. The Liceau offers various packages, none of which include all the operas, but do include other concerts that I do not necessarily want to attend. The total cost for a decent seat with a reasonable view is astonishingly large, but if you look on it as a year’s worth of entertainment then I suppose it becomes a little more reasonable. But it’s a lot of money to pay out all in one go!
And I’m unemployed!
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