The Price of Living in a Real City

My neighborhood is super noisy

Every March people complain about the noise in Valencia.

In fact, starting this week, many people—particularly locals—will leave town.

That’s because the Las Fallas festival is happening.

Part of me gets it. But another part of me doesn’t quite understand—particularly if you’re not a local.

The two videos below and the images at the end of this post—from last year’s Fallas—as intense as they are, don’t even begin to capture the scale and magnitude of this event. What you’re seeing here happens in the middle of the street—at intersections—in the middle of neighborhoods across the city. Our neighborhood is one of the epicenters.