Holy Thursday

Today we slept in until almost eleven. Natalia and I stayed in our pajamas and worked on booking some last minute things for our Italy trip. It was kind of nice to get to stay in bed and be lazy, I feel like I've been going none stop since I got here and it was nice to relax. Our roommate came home around one in the afternoon and it was nice to see her back home and doing really well. Sian was nice enough to go and get her from the hospital and make sure all the right paperwork was filled out, she took her home as well and helped her understand any questions she might have.

Later I skyped my parents to see how things were going. I made some soup for dinner, it's my favorite right now, and Natalia and I shared it before we headed out to see one of the processions. We met Sian and a few other girls in the Plaza Mayor at about eight. We were a bit early for the procession so we talked for a while until we saw people starting to line along either side of an invisible aisle. I was impressed that the people were able to keep the aisle exactly the right width for the procession to walk through, without any markers or guards. Interesting. So we lined up and got a front row view. We stood and waited for the procession to get here for over an hour. We watch some police on motorcycles ride through the aisle to make sure it was clear. One cop thought he was the best there was and kept speeding through the crowd and suddenly stopping; then he fell over. It was kind of sad because the bike fell on his leg so he needed help getting up, but he was kind of being a jerk so a lot people were snickering at him.

Behind Natalia and next to me was a tiny woman about sixty years old. Instead of asking if she could go in front or anything like that she took to pushing against Natalia. It was hilarious. So now she and I had an activity to entertain us. Every time someone would ask to go past us to walk to the other side we would scoot over and I would put myself between the woman and Natalia, and then a few minutes later the woman would worm her way between us again. We were cracking up.

Eventually we could hear drums and we knew the procession was close. The procession is slow to represent Jesus' walk with the cross, but also because they have one to two large floats that men carry. They carry the floats for a few yards and then stop and rest – they will do this all night. The people in robes are hooded so that there is no discrimination between the people who are being judged. The more penitent people walked the entire night barefoot, and we saw one person with chains around their feet. The contrast of the long purple candles they carried with the holes in their robes for their eyes made the entire procession rather eerie. I loved it.