Semana Santa...

In absence of the Easter Bunny, I thought I would share a bit about what has been going on here culturally for Semana Santa, this past week. These images are all borrowed from other websites by the way, I didn't take any of them myself, but I've been watching this stuff on the news all week long.

Okay, this creeped me out a bit to be honest. This is the traditional costume for the Semana Santa parades which are particularly big in Seville... you can guess what my first thought was, but it turns out the KKK actually were copying the Spanish who have been doing this for many, many generations.


Okay, the fallas: Every year in Valencia, people work on these really elaborate parade floats. Usually the floats sort of poke fun at something cultural or political. You can see here just how massive they are, and usually they involve lots of detail.


Here is another float from a past year... every year they vote on the best one and then...



....they burn them all to the ground. Yes, that's right, they burn them on the streets. This woman is in some traditional dress watching all of her hard work go up in smoke... literally. On the news it is actually quite morbid, because children and adults alike are all crying and sobbing seeing all of their work get burned to a crisp... and then news reporters interview them asking them just how crummy they feel. If that's not a life lesson, I don't know what is. Brutal.