Corpus Sitges 2018 and Mother Nature

Mother Nature is in charge…no matter what we wish. Yesterday was Corpus Sitges 2018. A beautiful festival where the streets of Sitges are transformed (by lots of hard work) into carpets of floral designs. This is one festival that Bob and I looked forward to seeing in person last year. I wrote about it here.

Unfortunately, our memory of last year’s Corpus was tainted. On our way home about 1km from our house the Mossos (Catalan police) have a road block and we are stopped. It is a Sunday morning and they are checking to see if people are still intoxicated from Saturday night. Bob was not tested for that but when they asked for his driver’s license we were told that we did not have the proper documents. What this ended up meaning was they followed us home, gave us a ticket for 500€ ($618) and told us not to drive the car until we had either an International Driver’s Permit or a Spanish Driver’s license. You can read Bob’s account of it here. It was a horrible experience and a frantic time for us to live in a hilltop village and not even able to go to the store. Thankfully our wonderful neighbors, Kim and Virginia, drove us anywhere we needed to go. A week later we had our International Driver’s Permits thanks to the help of our friend Sondra in North Carolina.

So, every time I think of Corpus last year…that is my memory. And I hate it. We planned to go this year but we wanted to see the procession as last year we saw the carpets being created.

“– 20:00h Procession of the Most Holy Sacrament, including children who have celebrated Holy Communion this year, the Pubilles and Hereus, members of the congregation, the Gegants, the Moixiganga, the Àliga paper mache, dragon paper mache.”

Sometimes plans get altered though. Bob had work to do do until about 3pm. Well, prior to that the skies had opened up and the deluge of rain had washed the floral carpets down the roads and down the drains. I saw the posts of the finished floral carpets on Facebook and then the videos of the rain washing them away. I felt so bad for all the people (both children and adults) who worked so hard to create them. Part of the procession took place but a lot of it was cancelled. We didn’t see any of it in person.

I’m letting go of last year’s memory now. Hopefully next year we can assist in creating one of the floral carpets and enjoy the entire day. Here are a couple of photos from last year.

I did take this photo last week in anticipation for the event.

I was disappointed that we missed seeing it but then Mother Nature stepped in again to cheer me up.