Fiesta de las castañas

Everybody knows the good ol' Christmas song about "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" but how many people have actually tried roasted chestnuts? I hadn't until this past Friday, but I can now count myself among the lucky few that have.

Friday afternoon we celebrated la fiesta de las castañas, literally "the chestnut party." It really wasn't much of a party, but it was cool to get to see a bit of local culture. All the kids brought their chestnuts to school on Thursday, and Friday morning a bunch of mom's showed up at the school with their little grills and got to roasting. With all the windows open in the classrooms, it smelled like fall all morning and I was excited to finally get to try the legendary roasted chestnuts.

Everybody knows the good ol' Christmas song about "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" but how many people have actually tried roasted chestnuts? I hadn't until this past Friday, but I can now count myself among the lucky few that have.

Friday afternoon we celebrated la fiesta de las castañas, literally "the chestnut party." It really wasn't much of a party, but it was cool to get to see a bit of local culture. All the kids brought their chestnuts to school on Thursday, and Friday morning a bunch of mom's showed up at the school with their little grills and got to roasting. With all the windows open in the classrooms, it smelled like fall all morning and I was excited to finally get to try the legendary roasted chestnuts.

At 11:30 during the break, all the kids and teachers went outside and got their chestnuts. Some of the kids actually ate their chestnuts while I think the majority used theirs as ammo in a chestnut throwing war. Yolanda, Valeria, Jose Luis and I, on the other hand, huddled around the trashcans and peeled and ate our chestnuts as the kids all ran wild around us.

At noonish the kids broke up into 3 groups and we started the second part of the party--the game. I had no idea what the game was all about. I only knew that it involved a trompo (pictured right) which is wooden top that you wrap a string around and then strategically chunk to the ground so that it spins on its little metal tip. I quickly learned that the game was not at all complicated. There was a square drawn on the ground with chalk and a pile of chestnuts in the middle. The object was to throw the top into the pile of chestnuts and get it to bailar (literally "dance" but in this context meaning "spin") so that it knocked as many chestnuts as possible out of the square. Some of the older kids were actually pretty good at it, but the little ones were awful. Most of them couldn't even get the top spin so they were essentially just hurling the top at the pile of chestnuts as hard as they could to knock them out haha. Not gonna lie, I couldn't get it to spin either...it's not nearly as easy as it looks.

After school, I came back home and started looking for info about the game on the internet so I could blog about it. Much to my surprise, I couldn't find anything. I guess this is only a traditional game in Rioja. Getting to see little pieces of local culture like this is one of the coolest things about my job and just about being in a foreign country in general. Also, a perk of working on Fridays is that I get to be a part of all the parties that I didn't get to participate in last year.