Sardines Anyone?

Thursday March 20, 2008

 Today is “Jueves Santo” (Holy Thursday) and it is one of the biggest days in Sevilla for all of the pasos and for the Holy Week celebration. Tonight at midnight is the time that Jesus “dies” and all of the most famous pasos in the city leave their respective churches to head to La Catedral and back. The first one leaves at 12:30am and they continue leaving until around 4am. Most of the pasos are gone this night for around 10-14 hours on foot. So, in the spirit of the holiday, we decided that we were going to go out around 11pm and stay out into the wee hours of the morning to catch the pasos. We found a spot on the curb in the center of the city where most of the pasos pass and we sat and waited for the first paso to go by. The paso closest to us left the church at 1:05am; therefore we had some time to play the name game. I’m especially good at the double S’s, for the record, so watch out if we ever play and you throw that letter at me. Anyway, we waited on the curb for 2 hours and finally the paso called “El Silencio” (The Silence) began to pass by. The cool thing about this paso is that everyone is in dead silence…the crowd, the Nazarenos, everyone. There was something like 800 Nazarenos and then the two pasos as well, so we were there for a while. Afterwards we walked more towards the center to catch the “Jesús del Gran Poder” (Jesus of Great Power) paso, and we go stuck like sardines for a good two hours. I wanted to fall asleep standing because it was 3a.m. so I took it upon myself to rest my head on a hugely tall guy in front of me. He kind of looked at me awkwardly but it worked for me. And don’t worry; Sara took a picture of the matter. After the two pasos had gone by we fought our way out of the crowd. I was almost attacked by a Spanish guy that was trying to tell me how beautiful I was (in really poor English) when Allison grabbed one of my arms and Sara grabbed the other and got me out of the situation. It was sweet because it was something that you would see the secret service do. Allison turned to the guy, said “NO,” swooped me up and we hurried away. I think we killed his self-esteem, and rightfully so. We got home after making our way through the thousands of people around 4am, and I don’t think that I’ve ever been so happy to be in my bunk bed. (Yah, bunk beds!)