San Sebastian Day

Yeah, really, San Sebastian Day, it's a freakin party for twenty four hours.  Many times this city just seems to party for the hell of it, I mean how else would regattas (September 20th) on a Sunday afternoon mean a party, but since they were here people were dancing in the street to no music at 4:30 in the afternoon.  Now this particular party is not what you would think, San Sebastian just inventing another party because they can and then naming it after themselves, no, this has a back story.  The town is named after St. Sebastian, an actual dude, (Santo, San.=Saint, St.) and every saint has their own day.  Thus they party on that day.  Just like San Francisco or San José, wait, they actually don't celebrate the days of their saints, soooooo, I guess San Sebastian just likes its parties.  Celebrating in the name of a Saint would mean alms giving and self sacrifice, and that sounded like a real downer to Spaniards, so they replaced virtues with drums, lots and lots and lots of drums.  All the songs played on San Sebastian Day come from one man, one composer, with the guiding muse of turning the city into a violent mob with a massive headache.
The day starts literally as soon as possible, since it fell on a Thursday, everyone who is anyone (including me) piled into Constitution Square (La Plaza de la Constitution) at 11:45PM Wednesday.  When I say piled I should actually say forced and squeezed and jammed as tightly as possible.  So much so that while pushing our way in my friends and I needed to hold one another's shoulders to keep from losing each other.  People looking like soldiers file onto the stage, this is the band, and for every person holding a clarinet or trumpet or some other less manly instrument there is at least one person with a drum.  Percussion seems to have been selected because of ease of use, from small children, all the way up to drunk Australian tourists.  No matter who you are it is physically possible to bang a stick against a piece of wood, and that seems to be what San Sebastian Day was going for anyways.  Sure it is possible to get good at playing the drums, but that would take a lot of time, practice, and not drinking.  That is not to say that San Sebastian does not have good drum players, in fact at midnight professionals start and is probably the one night of the year when all the nerds and wussys who spent their time learning a skill get to be popular.  I got home at about four AM that night and went to bed to the sound of continuing drums.  When I woke at ten to drums the following morning I felt a certain sense of familiarity with the song being played.  In fact I was sure I had heard it before, actually multiple times before, the previous night.  Well I suppose that the composer of the San Sebastian Day songs can hardly be blamed, I mean twenty four hours of straight playing, their bound to repeat the same song several times even if he had wrote thirty.  Although he did not quite make it to thirty, or twenty, nope this composer decided that he had a solid five songs, and they could be played over and over and over, with the drums, drums, drums. 
I accompany my host parents to La Playa de la Concha where my host sister was marching in the children's version of the Taborrada (Drums) band.  It was definitely a great choice to have to professional adults playing the nights and the kids playing the days.  Even though the sober day crowd would appreciate the professionals much more, I think the drunken night crowd would scar the children for life.  So for two hours we watch the 52 middle schools march around the city.  After the parade I head back to my host family's house to rest because everyone goes out again that night to celebrate the end of the day.  This time I am hanging out with former Rotary Exchange students (I'm the only current Rotary student in San Sebastian) and we pack ourselves into the Plaza just like the night before.  Just to mix things up a bit the band breaks away from the five songs we have heard all day and starts to play some futbal chants, which gets everyone in that violent hooligan frame of mind which everyone knows ends in happiness and peaceful discussions of feelings.  With five minutes left until midnight the band whips out what I believe to be its grand finale, the crowd goes crazy and the band gets louder, and then all of a sudden, it's over.  Everyone is cheering and the band has stopped, well I suppose that's that, nothing more we can do un... BANG BANG BANG, drums, drums, drums, boomboomboom, the band starts up again, how dare logic try to put an end to the party.  The band marches through the street for another three hours.  That's San Sebastian for you, they work and work until they can't take anymore, then they party for twenty four hours straight, then after all they partying the need to unwind, with some more partying.  Not that I did not love the party, but I wish it was spread out over a few weeks, because I cannot squeeze all my partying into one day.