Semana Santa (Holy Week)

Alright, so this was the week before Easter, but it takes forever for me to upload pictures because the computers here won't let us download any of the easy upload tools.

Anyway, so Semana Santa is the week before Easter. We had the Thursday and Friday off from school and everything was closed - yeah for 94% of the population being Catholic. They have this precession Wednesday through Sunday night of the different churches. Each one has a float, I believe different stations of the cross, and they wear different colors. The kids take part in it too. The crazy thing though is the adult outfits look like the Ku Klux Klan! (Note: Looks like the KKK, is not the KKK. Probably where the KKK got the idea from!) Our coordinator said they wear the hoods because they are sinners and so they have to have their faces covered (I guess kids haven't sinned enough yet?). Some had hoods pointing up and some were down, but I don't know what the significance was in that. The ones with the hoods down looked like executioners, so I don't which was worse. Then the floats are either carried or on wheels, and they apparently weigh a ton. The ones that had people carrying them had 12 people and they took breaks. They had the floats on display in town the whole week when they weren't in use.

There were some bands with mostly drums, but one had trumpets and trumpet-like instruments that sounded really out of tune, but maybe it's supposed to sound like that. I could hear it from my apartment and was able to go down the street to see the people walking on their way to the precession. I'm glad they warned us about it because while it was pretty cool looking, it would have been pretty disturbing to run into it walking down the street.

There was also a festival at a town nearby that I was going to go to, but that didn't work out. My friend said it was like the live version of Passion of the Christ, and there was a guy who jumped and hung himself from a tree (with a harness, but still.) Crazy stuff.

If you want to see more pictures of the processions you can go here.

Happy belated Easter,
Anica