Walls

That's it, just photographs of walls in San Miguel de Allende, sometimes with a little munchkin standing in front.

The Nature of Things

We've made several trips to the local Jardin Botanico (Botanical Gardens), which is a pretty place full of desert plants, a river, walking trails, and lots of cactus. Right now, they also have a Reptile Exhibit, which greatly pleased the little munchkin.

First, here's some cactus:






Apparently, the Burmese python and the boa constrictor are friends, which possibly explains why the Burmese python replaced the Brazilian boa constrictor in the first Harry Potter movie:


Here’s a close-up of the two buddies:


And here’s Indigo posing with some of her new friends:

I'm back!

Our Internet connection has been broken for almost two weeks, and we’ve been running to Internet cafes to check our email, but blogging is something that I can only do from the comfort of home, for some reason. I’ve been writing, though, so I should be able to post a lot in the next week or so.

First, one more Semana Santa post. The Thursday and Friday before Easter are Holy Thursday and Good Friday, although, they’re called something slightly different in Spanish that I've already forgotten. Holy Thursday in San Miguel is, you’ll be shocked to hear, a big party. They closed a lot of the streets downtown after dusk, and there were tons of tents set up with people selling food and drink. All of the churches set up big beautiful altars, and people go from church to church looking at them. Supposedly, if you visit 7 churches on Holy Thursday you are guaranteed to avoid Purgatory -- kind of a spiritual Get Out of Jail Free card, I guess. We didn’t actually manage to visit 7 churches, but I suspect that you probably have to be Catholic as part of the deal. Amy wasn’t feeling well, so Indigo and I went alone. She was surprisingly fascinated by looking at the altars (even though, unlike the Thursday before, no one was giving out ice cream), and didn’t even mind that it was really crowded. We went to 4 or 5 churches, skipping the ones with the longest lines to get in. Indigo has become very interested in Jesus -- she particularly likes it when He is dripping with blood. She enjoys counting his “owies,” the gruesome little thing that she is. Anyway, here are some of the altars we saw:




However, the highlight of the evening, from Indigo’s point of view, was this:


On Good Friday, the activity was a "Procession of the Priests," which is basically another dress-up parade, complete with Romans on the church roof:


Unfortunately, we only got to see a little bit of it, because Indigo had a major meltdown while we were waiting for the parade to get to us and we had to drag her home, kicking and screaming. Aren't toddlers great? Anyway, here's a couple of images of the parade:

Little Angels

Last Wednesday, we went to see a Semana Santa procession that involves little boys (and a few little girls) dressing up as various characters related to Jesus, and little girls (and a few little boys) dressed like angels, and adults carrying several statues, one of which is an old and famous Lord of the Columns statue, which is a statue of Jesus leaning on a column which is one of the Stations of the Cross. If this sounds confused, it's because it's totally unclear to me how all those details fit together, but it was lovely.

First came the little angels, many of whom were younger than Indigo, much to her delight:





The angels were followed by what looks to me like several different versions of Jesus, or is that Moses with the 10 Commandments? But what is Moses doing here?:



I think these are the apostles:

And then some lepers:


Amy thinks this is Judas, because he was jangling coins:

Then some Romans:

And, last, the three statues:

Boom! Happy Easter!

If you've been reading this blog you won't be surprised to hear that San Miguel de Allende has a quirky way of celebrating Easter. It seems to focus on things that go BOOM. It started at midnight last night with a fireworks display at the local church, which we had a great view of from our window:

Today at noon, in the central plaza, 25 life-sized papier mache puppets were blown up. This was supposed to represent the burning of Judas Iscariot (which, Amy tells me, didn't really happen - Judas died by hanging himself - but whatever). However, you'd have to stretch your imagination pretty far to make any of them look like Judas, especially the witches with the pointy hats and the Mexican banditos, but I suppose if we asked the local priest he'd say something about symbolism, but I suspect that the whole thing is not so much symbolic as it's just really fun and cool. I'm telling you, this beats an Easter Egg hunt hands down.

Here are the 25 of them strung up beforehand:

To add to the wackiness, each Judas was sponsored by a local business, as you can see by the attached banners. (Amy noticed that the Judas sponsored by the restaurant "El Mariachi" actually looks like a mariachi, and also that an awful lot of them looked like gringos.):

The witch on the right, complete with broomstick, was my favorite:

The way it works is that each puppet has a frame that holds a row of firecrackers. The puppet is lowered and the cord is lit:

Then the puppet gets hauled back up, and spins around and smokes for a few minutes:

And then explodes:

It makes a lot of noise:

The limbs get piled up here:

While this young man collects the heads:

He was quite good at this responsibility, carefully piling up the heads, which are later sold for 200 pesos each (although some of them required repairs first):

You can see how the head count increased over the course of the celebration:







Here's Indigo posing with the entire collection:

And here's a few assorted images:








After it's all over, people scramble for souvenirs: