Semena Santa and a Shift Change

First: all my love and affection to W, who is at this moment somewhere over ireland, winging her way home to canada. We´ve had a shift change here. we successfully retrieved Joanna from the train station on Sunday night (meeting her with beer, as requested). Wendy left monday night, after an afternoon of shoe shopping and chasing the Semena Santa parades.

So this is my 3rd full day in Seville. this is a really wonderful city--well at least the parts that are in walking distance of our apartment. We are lucky to be in the old city centre, so I will admit that we don´t tend to get farther than a rambling walking distance. But that´s fine, as everything is only a 15 minute walk away, if you can only figure out the twisty narrow streets. But even if you do get lost, there is always a little tapas bar or bodega in the square you pop out into to help you with supplies and directions!

Semena Santa is in full swing here. I can´t really do it justice in a short blog post, but essentially what happens is that each parish in the city sends out a troup of people to carry two floats ( one depicting Jesus in a tableau of some part of the easter story and another with a Mary statue) to the cathedral and back. The floats are huge, they take 40 -50 men to carry each one. there are a couple of marching bands to sent the rhythm of the marching of the troup. The strangest thing though for a north american, is that they dress in long tunics, capes and pointy hats--essentially the KKK outfit that is burned in our minds. it is kind of creepy! While I intellectually understand that the hoods are meant to hide the identity of the pious person so that they are known only to god, the hoods just give me the creeps. have a look:

http://z.about.com/d/gospain/1/0/U/C/-/-/semsanmal2_jari.JPG

So the procession of these troups (which i should add have up to 2500 people in each troup) takes up to 12 hours to do the trip from their church to the city centre cathedral and back. Which means that there are troups moving around the city literally day and night, all week. Traffic stops, and these massive crowns rush from one point in the city to another to see their favourite troups. it is madness. But fun madness!

An now i must go, as it is sunny out, and Jo and I are planning a picnic in the gardens of the Alcazar, a moorish buildt pleasure palace.... bring on the cheese, wine, tinkling fountains, orange blossoms and a nap in the grass...