Semana Santa

So on Tuesday night I went to the processions in Granada which were pretty cool. I know I mentioned this to some people already, but the population of the city (300,000) doubles during the week before Easter. It is noticable too. The streets were packed with strollers, street venders, teenages and more. I snuck my way to the front of the croud of people watching the parade, and took everything in. That tuesday about 6floats passed by me, proceeded by penitents (the cloak wearers)for the floats of Jesus or women dressed in black for the floats of Mary, and followed by marching bands. They went by at a painfully slow pace because they were being carried. Occasionaly (actually a lot) they would stop to rest, and then before they started walking they would usually lift the figuers off their sholders and carry them for a while in thier hands above thier heads. This feats were accompanied by bursts of applause. It was pretty cool to see.

I saw the procession on Good Friday in a pueblo called Cuevas de Almonzar, which is where María grew up. This was a little more...fun...than the one in Granada. There were a lot of kids in the streets watching and some of the people in the parade handed out candy (though not a lot). Also, in between the floats that were carried there was live scenes of the Passion. One time an actor portraying Jesus walked by with his cross dragging and he was surrounded my the "Judios" (Jews), who were dressed in clothes similar to clowns and had their faces painted so that they looked ugly (I thought they looked more comical, but whatever), and they carried clubs and would yell at the crouds and fake-hit the Jesus. They scared one of my host brothers quite a lot, so he watched the rest of the parade from half a block away with his dad.

So yeah, that was my Semana Santa experience. Not very much, because in Granada there were processions everyday, all different, but enough, I think, to say that I successfully experienced a Holy Week in the south of Spain.