Xacobeo, part II

We spent the next couple of hours wandering through the streets, often accompanied by an extremely loud and raucous spanish style oompah band.  We passed by an ancient university building and saw musicians taking a break from playing traditional galician music.  This was the nationalist section of the festival.  A lot of hip-looking young people were milling around under signs for Nunca Maís (an ecological group dedicated to preventing disasters like the recent Prestige oil spill on the galician coast -- it's allied with some radical nationalist groups) and anti-ñ signs (a statement against the Spanish language, which has the ñ, in favor of gallego, which does not) carrying huge plastic bottles of cheap plonk.

We ambled to another plaza in time to hear the last couple of songs by the francophone Orchestre Nationale de Barbès.  They put on an excellent show.  They cobbled together traditional arab vocals and percussion with some more western elements, like long electric guitar solos and surreal coordinated back-up dances à la The Supremes.  They're final song was a french-accented version of Sympathy for the Devil.  Quite a choice for a saint's birthday celebration.

We started heading home at 3am, though no one else on the street showed signs of being tired.