The fall down

By | 2006-05-15

My english teacher asked me about doing a writing composition. I told him about my nice style of writing short stories histories in spanish (in fact I don’t like my writing style agree my style, but most of my friends do), and he wants to read it me… in english. I’m not too confident about my vocabulary level, to explain with precision the feelings, but let’s try… also I want to write without the help of my dictionary… I’m sure it’ll be more interesting. Let’s go!
[UPDATED: Now with corrections of my teacher, marked with bold and strikethrough text. I’m feeling like a duck! ]

CastellersLast Sunday (a really sunny day) I went to a square next to my home, to watch a casteller’s meeting. Let me tell you about “castellers“: here in Catalonia one of the nicest traditions are “castellers” (directly translated as “castle builders”), who try to make “human castles”. They make made a circle of people persons, and they start to climb over the “first floor”, and build a new floor, and so on… until 6 or 7 floors high. It’s always incredible to see, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve had you seen it already, you feel it’s like a demostration of the nicest group-work made by humans. When the last floor is built, usually a small girl, children, called “anxaneta”, climbs to the highest point and to makes a signal sign with her hand, and all the public start to make do a big noise, a strong feeling, a big applause, to appreciate/thanks the courage valenty of the column’s builders.

Spring is the castellers’ season. There are some well known groups of castellers, usually formed with 40 or 50 people, who try to build the most impressive columns. They have an oficial ranking! Last year the record was a 9-floor column, with 4 persons per floor… close your eyes and imagine a man standing on over your shoulders, and then another man on top of over him… until 9 levels high and arrive to the 9-floor: incredible! It’s not only a question of having strong men, but really a question of perfect technique (because there are a lot of techniques involved here: the way they climb, and they use the force, etc and those issues). Usually the group is commanded by a team-leader boss, who knows when it’s secure to climb, and when to stop, and he gives tell a lot of orders to the climbers, so normaly these those demonstrations are free of accidents.

But last Sunday the boss waited too long much to abort the climbing. They were trying to build a 2-8 (8 floors, 2 persons per floor), but when they made the 6th floor, the column started to vibrate dangerously. All the public were was really nervous, and the little girl was already climbing, but suddenly the boss shouted “STOP!”. The girl went down quickly without problems, but the next floor unluckily fell fall down. It was a sad moment, with an empty feeling. Nobody made any noise. The party froze was frozen. People from the emergency urgency service came and took take one of the fallen castellers guys to the ambulance. No more demonstrations, everybody all people was shocked. Neither Nor the public nor neither the castellers moved walked. It was really weird, a shame, everybody all people wore with flat and white faces, without blood movement. I waited around half an hour and then I came back home.