Sant Juan

So this was on Friday last week, the day of Sant Juan and the longest day of the year. Basically everyone buys heaps of fireworks (petados) and light fires and continue them all night long so in theory the day never ends. We went to a barbie (or at least a Catalan equivalent) after seeing this huge fire in the street which people were throwing crackers into. Safe to say I was pretty jumpy to whole night, expecting a stray firework to find it's way up the back of my shirt or worse... everyone was really surprised that fireworks are (mostly) illegal in Australia and I asked "but don't people die and lose limbs and things"? to which the response was "oh yeah, but the main problem is when fireworks get into apartments and start fires"... right, but that's not enough to ban them!! I'm trying to get my head around this different culture but sometimes it seems very backwards!!