Hello from Ibiza (4)
October 1, 2004, 9:50 pm
So we spent our last day here today, the last day of this truly
amazing 2 week vacation. Yesterday, after our little beach
experience at Cala Llonga we went to the town of Sant Miquel
where they have a live performance of folkloric dancing every
Thursday evening at 6:15 pm.
The performance was inside the white-washed church's inner yard
and we sat down with another 40 to 50 tourists to watch a group
of about 10 children and teenagers who were all dressed up in
traditional Ibizan outfits. The boys wore black or white pants
with vests over a shirt and red long hats, almost like
nightcaps. The girls all wore headscarves and some of them wore
traditional Ibizan wedding dresses with 13 layers of skirts!
They performed a number of dances, with the boys jumping and
kicking their legs up high, while the girls mostly walked around
them, demurely in tiny little steps. Obviously some courtship
and wedding dances, the instruments were mostly a flute, a metal
instrument that looked like a sword that was used for
percussion, plus a little drum. Some of the flutes played were
introduced by the Egyptians around stwo thousand years ago. The
boys also used very large castanets. Definitely a very
interesting experience, in terms of dress, music and dance,
Ibiza is a very unique culture, extremely different from the
typical Spanish or Andalusian stereotype of flamenco dancing.
Today we went into Sant Antoni where I took a 1.5 hour boat ride
(8 Euros) on a glass bottom boat. We went around the south part
of Sant Antoni bay to Cala Bassa. A diver was also on board and
at one part we stopped and she dove in and brought back a few
animals, 2 sea worms, a sea star and a very thorny animal who