We stumble upon the Catalan version of a Renaissance fair. It is the "Fira de L'Aixada"...or "Feste de La Llum;" I see both and their translations, "Fair of the Hoe" and "Feast of the Light" don't seem to coincide, thought I was relatively certain there was only one festival occurring that day in the tiny town. Despite the confusion, the booths of freshly cooked meats and breads, the falconry tent, acrobats, and random people in inexplicable medieval dress required no definitions.
After a few cups of barrel-ladled red wine, I ask a local (in Spanish) for directions to one of the squares we had been before. I receive a lengthy reply and feel as if I'm having trouble following him. I recognize a couple words and jump at my first chance to end the conversation and "follow" his advice. As we wander in what seems to have been the indicated route, I feel troubled that I so misunderstood him. My Spanish is better than that. Did that wine go to my head without my noticing? Only later did I realize he was speaking in Catalan. The Catalonian town was so small that its locals didn't even speak Spanish--or refused to. Though this fact was no more reassuring to my state of mind, since not noticing a language change is a decidedly worse mistake.
Walking through the narrow cobbled streets, we run into a small plaza with a milling crowd. We join the fringes and watch a troupe of costumed dancers perform a group routine. The music ends, the dancers disperse, and a man dressed as a jester takes up a mic and begins to speak (it is now obviously a language we do not understand). It becomes apparent that he is picking people from the crowd to some costumed purpose; a crowned king and queen have already been chosen. A helper jester circuits the crowd and then there he is. Right in front of me. His hand is on my wrist and I am being pulled--firmly--forward. I dig in my heels--firmly. No way, no how. I have always dreaded being in front of crowds, let alone ones whose language I do not understand, and certainly let alone ones who desire to costume me and, in all likelihood, make a giant ass out of me.
Which is indeed exactly what happened after my so-called friends gave me a big push from behind and made me stumble forward into the jester's eager clutches.
Let me say as a side note that I do not so much blend into a Spanish crowd, per se. To be explicit, I am close to six feet tall and have white blonde hair. No one needed to see the first look of disturbed confusion to cross my face to realize I had no idea what they were talking about. I suspect this had something to do with my selection.
So, I am pulled through the crowd and exit to the unfriendly vacuum of the empty plaza. I am placed next to the king and queen and then--oh yes--a cone princess hat, veil attached, is strapped securely to my head. It's not terribly necessary to go in depth on the utter mortification I felt at that moment, and for fifteen or so minutes that followed.
What followed was pretty much one constant stream of ridicule. The jester narrated and the characters (of which I was, apparently, the princess), were led to run around the plaza and pantomime certain scenes with the help of a few props and some creative charades on the part of the helper jesters. After a few explosions of laughter from the crowd, I caught on that I had missed my cue to do or say something. Hard as I tried to comprehend, though, I could never anticipate when I would be called and was thus, expectedly, publicly ridiculed several more times; notably, once when the jester looked at me significantly and repeated himself several times, and then finally said, "di 'bop,'" which I finally understand as meaning, say "bop." Which I then did, with a sigh of relief that was greeted by an exponential rise in general hilarity. Too late I realized that something along the lines of, "Say -blank-. No? Come on. Say it. You can't? Well, then just say 'bop'."--had just occurred. Lovely.
It is difficult to emphasize how long this actually went on. The dumb foreigner joke just did not get old with that crowd. Finally though, the play seemed to come to some sort of climax, ending with me hand in hand with my short and sweaty-palmed prince. And then, something I finally did understand, as the characters were held up for applause: "y la princesa rosa, guapa pero tonta."
"...and the blonde princess, pretty but stupid."
Lovely.
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