Feria Rains

So, it's that time of the year again: Feria. Feria is basically town fair. Every town has a specific day once a year that is their fair, and for about a week and a half the town has a bunch of random events relating to the feria, all of which require the heavy use of bombas, those lovely explosive devices that are shot up into the air and explode without any fireworks, just a poof of smoke and a really loud noise that often shakes my house.

It started about a week ago with some random parades involving school bands. The strange thing about the parades is that there were probably eight different schools represented, and each one had their own band, but between the bands there were cars driving with speakers attached to their roofs, and they were playing really loud music out of them that was completely unrelated to what the bands were doing. I, of course, hid in my house, but since I live on a corner with a "capilla" (which is the thing in the photo with the yellow posts under which a motorcyclist is seeking shelter from the rain) that means that all parades pass right outside my bedroom door. So I got the strange experience of 10-15 seconds of elementary school marching band music followed by really loud "Ranchera" music (you know, the mmm-pa, mmm-pa music with high pitched cowboy yelling on occasion, usually involving an accordion and a tuba) for 10-15 seconds followed by another marching band. This is a pretty normal thing for me these days, so I almost forgot to mention it in my blog, but then I realized that I may never have mentioned it, and it's common enough that if you want to understand life here you should probably know about it.

So that was the opening parade of the feria, but from what I can tell they have some sort of parade or procession almost every day. I couldn't tell you what they all were, but one of them was a horse parade in which all the participants rode horses and some of them had the horses do tricks and things as they went along. Since I live in a cowboy town, that's probably most people's favorite parade, and normally it is accompanied with a rodeo, but there was no rodeo this year, and no one seems completely sure why.

The actual day of feria was Wednesday, so Tuesday night was the big party night (because no one has to work on feria, in fact they use the word feriado to mean a day off of work regardless of whether or not it's actually feria). That meant that normally tons of people go out to the park and ride all the rides (yes, we have rides like ferris wheels and things brought into the middle of town for the feria, they just put them in the middle of the street because there's not really enough space for them anywhere else) and eat all the feria food like churros (deep fried batter of some sort with some sugar often served with chocolate sauce, which sounds way better than it actually is), tacos, sweets, crazy corn-on-the-cob (covered in mayonnaise and ketchup, yech), etc. This year, though, we have a tropical depression hanging out over the country, so it rained like crazy all night. Thus, the only celebration that I was aware of came in the form of bombas and fireworks. They started shooting off bombas around, well, it's hard to say because I think they were doing it the whole day, but they started like crazy around 9pm. Then they had fireworks with actual colors and stuff, but it was pouring so I didn't go out to see them. Then when they finished those they went back to bombas until about 11pm. Now, an important fact for this story is that Peace Corps asked us to go to a meeting on Wednesday at 8:30 in Antigua, which meant getting up around 6 to get there on time. So I was a little frustrated when the bombas started back up again at 3am, along with cohetes, which are like firecrackers that sound like gunfire for about a minute at a time. They lit off these two different types of noisemakers for about an hour and a half, and then stopped long enough for me to get one more hour of sleep before I had to leave.

Now unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) I missed the events of the actual feria because once we got to Antigua we were informed that we wouldn't be able to leave because the rain was making the roads dangerous, so we stayed a night in a hotel, but from what I understand nothing happened in the feria because it was raining too hard. I got back to site the next day (yesterday) and got back to participating.

Now let me get into the events from last night, which is the real reason that I was inspired to write a blog post at all. Last night was the "burning of the castle" which I will explain. As with any feria event, it was prefaced with hours of bombas, which did a good job of shaking my house and making me wish that I hadn't lost my earplugs. Then one of my Guatemalan friends called me and invited me to go out to watch the burning of the castle, which excited me mostly because I don't get invited to things very often these days. It hadn't been raining much yesterday, so I went out without a rain jacket or umbrella, which was probably not the smartest thing, but didn't actually backfire on me at all. It was around 7pm, so it was fully dark outside and it was slightly drizzling, but mostly fine. In front of the Catholic church that's next to the park a block from my house there was a large gathering of people forming. I found two girls that I know and they took me into the street to watch as some people pulled the "castle" into an upright position in the middle of the street. The castle was a 15 x 15 foot square metal frame with various fireworks attached to it from top to bottom. It was held in place by ropes attached to the top that were held by people on either side of the street. I am pretty sure that it was supposed to be a big chain-reaction type thing where they light the bottom and the fire works its way up to the top, but it was starting to rain a little more, so that didn't quite work out. The guy in charge of lighting the thing seemed to have prepared for this contingency because he had various objects to use to light the fuses that were higher up. At the end he climbed up a ladder that was leaned against the side of the frame and then used a five-foot stick thing with a flame on the end of it to light the last fireworks. Also, many of them didn't really light very well, or didn't fulfill their functions do to being somewhat damp, so I think the general majesty of the burning of the castle was somewhat reduced. Then there was the issue of umbrellas. It was raining a good bit by the time that they actually started lighting the castle, so people had started opening their umbrellas. The problem with this, as some of you may have experienced, is that umbrellas are excellent for blocking the view of the people behind you. So basically we would all have found a good window to see the castle burn, and then some oblivious person would walk in front of us and then open their umbrella, completely blocking the view of dozens of people, who would then proceed to yell random things in the direction of the umbrella, which were usually firmly ignored. It was at this point that I decided that I should mention the events of the night, because I was kind of cracking up the whole time at all the things that were happening around me, and it felt very symptomatic of my experience here at times. So when the castle was done burning some guys dressed in these small metallic frames in the shape of bulls that were covered in fireworks came out, and I remembered that this is when they run around scaring the crowd with fireworks shooting off of them in all directions, so I left to eat tacos.