What a week it has been with Semana Santa!!First off we had a statue of Jesus arrive into town on a donkey on Sunday, Wednesday his statue was carried by about 50 men and met up with a statue of Mary, Friday he was carried in a massive glass coffin around the plaza- and this was like a realistic manekin with blood and everything, and then on Sunday he was resurrected on top of the biggest monument thing ive ever seen and was carried by over 300 men!! They are very visual, so it was amazing to see them play out the life of Jesus with statues and manekins! Absolutely crazy but amazing! Before each parade, people also create these beautiful carpets, in the plaza, made of flowers and petals and dyed rice etc. The artwork created is absolutely amazing. You just cant believe they hand-made these carpets, they looked like real paintings. The sad thing was that every night we had torrential rain and all the hard work was just washed away in the rain!
So friday was cold and windy and wet but the parade continued and we got some great photos of Jesus being carried around the plaza. I could not believe how lifelike the manekin was! Come saturday morning, it was time for the running of the bulls!! Fantastic stuff! They had 5 bulls, but each coming through the plaza at a different time, and we got to run with/after it. It was quite scary, well not the bull so much, but i was so worried i was going to be crushed by the thousands of people! All you could hear was 'toro' and people would run and scream and push!! It was so mad!! We had lots of beer because it was so hot as the sun was out, and we all bought matching red shirts- a tradition Rudy said! So it was fantastic, there was singing and dancing and bands and just people everywhere. It was like one big party in the street in the middle of the day!!
After the running of the bulls we headed back to the plaza for night to watch the fireworks. They had the most amazing fireworks. I mean they seem to have some go off every night, but they are mainly just loud bangs, so it was great to actually see proper ones. After the fireworks went off, they lit up these other firework towers. There were about 15 of them scattered through the plaza and had different shapes and lights on them and were just so amazing!! We were standing within like 5metres of these towers and it was just crazy cos they were so loud!! When the fireworks had finished it was time for more drinking and dancing. By then it was about midnight and we had made some friends with some Peruvians from Lima who spoke english, which was great! So we partied and danced for hours until it was time for the easter sunday procession. It was great making local friends, cos now we have friends in Lima that we can go out with and show us around the town! It was meant to begin at 4am but of course, they are on Peruvian time ( very similar to Kimberley time), so it was about 6am before the procession started. And it was the best procession of the week!! The big float (Anda) was just amazing, it was the biggest thing i've seen and couldn't believe they had so many hundreds of people carrying it. It was obviously a massive shrine to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, and it was defiantely worth pulling an 'all-nighter' for that one! Just amazing.
So we made it home at about 7am and Rudy was to be arriving with the new volunteers at 7.45am so we quickly went to bed!! What an amazing night...its been years since i've pulled an all-nighter, back to my uni days i think :) but it was worth it. Best week ever and best night ever
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