When we returned from our road trip (5.30 pm on Sunday), traffic was completely crazy in Antigua! We couldn´t even get all the way back to the school (we had to walk the final mile from where we finally parked). With each passing week, the weekend celebration gets bigger and bigger (and the city becomes more and more of a parking lot). This week´s processional started at early our 10 or 11 and ended at midnight and went all over the place. And yet, it´s not the biggest yet... we still have 2 more weeks (with Good Friday having 3 or 4 processionals throughout just that one day - more on those later).
Anyhow, after the long weekend and several hours dodging traffic, I was exhausted. I went home and slept until around 7.30 and then went and got something to eat (as students, we have to manage our own food on Sundays - a day off for the host family). Then, I wandered around looking for the Processional. I figured I´d find it eventually, but after wandering aimlessly for a while with no luck, I found a map and realized that from 7-9 they went outside the city limits (I guess there´s just not enough room in the city for a 13+ hour parade)!
Anyhow, I found a map of the route and figured out where they´d soon be, and went there. I stumbled upon a family starting their ¨carpet¨ and I decided to plant myself there and watch things unfold. It was 8.50 pm and they were just getting going. The city had just finished towing illegally parked cars off their block and it was time to get going. I decided to stay and watch the whole deal from their spot. They built the carpet, the processional came by and then the cleanup crew did their thing. It lasted from 8.50 to 10.25 - a mere 95 minutes.
The dad of the family pointed here and there with suggestions and instruction - and yet the whole carpet was built by elementary school kids and their eldest brother. It was cool to see how into it they all were, and yet they were also relatively quiet and reverent throughout the whole things as well. the brother kinda sub-directed things and fixed up the stuff the other kids (if it needed fixing), but he and his eldest sister (I´m guessing on all the family relationships - they could have been cousins, friends, an uncle, etc...) kept things in order and finished up a pretty nice ¨family style¨ carpet.
Then along came the roman soldiers, the float carriers (and the floats), and a whole gauntlet of Processioners. What can I say... It´s a lot of people and a lot of work. It turns out that you have to pay to be in the processional, not to mention you have to buy the purple robes if you want to be a carrier. I think it´s about 7 dollars per ¨turn¨ to carry, but it kinda depends on a variety of factors. Anyhow, the float on Sunday had 80 carriers for each block and I think it was 70-ish block (let´s not do the math, ok?).
And then, lest you think they have a clean up crew hit the streets the next day at 3 am to get the city back to normal... Nope, the last line in the long line of ¨precessioners¨ is a row of street-sweepers (men who get paid instead of paying to , a back hoe, and 2 dumptrucks filled with all the ¨reamains¨ of the various carpets.So there you have it. 95 mintues of Processional-Fun!
I went home and took a shower and went to bed (oh, and took some fotos of a spider).
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