TonynJo: Fiesta de Corpus Christi

Tossed Inca scraps

feed the hungry river rats,

who are soon owl snacks.

Most nights, but especially during festivals, vendors apppear selling what I call "Street Meat" and, actually, I eat it quite often because the charcoal fire burns off the ameobas and it never makes me sick. Plus, it's only a dollar and it's tasty.

This report is on what happened back in mid-June, but as I said earlier, I'm just able to get to it now...mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

(the following purple prose is from a website put out locally by gringos)

Cuenca’s Setenario celebration is the city’s most explosive of the year, drawing tens of thousands of spectators to the city’s main plaza. As the name implies, the event runs for seven days but it is often extended for a day or two by government order if sponsors pony up the cash for additional fireworks. Setenario (also called Septenario) is a celebration contrived by the Catholic Church following the Spanish conquest to replace the indigenous June Solstice observance. Despite the fact that it coincides with the Catholic Corpus Christi observance and is partly sponsored by local churches, the festival bears little connection to Christian piety. In addition to nightly fireworks shows, Setenario is also famous for the sale of sweets. More than a hundred candy and pastry stands line Calles Sucre, Malo and Cordero, each under its own canopy with tables piled high with candy, pastries and cookies. Besides attracting customers, the sweets are also popular with honey bees. Buyers beware!

Now we go back to wonderful photographs by Joella and smart a-- coments by yours truely,

Here we have The Holy Cathedral surrounded and being held hostage by candy mongers.

Sweets of every size, color, shape and description imaginable.

And they're all singing Sammy Davis Jr.'s "the Candyman can" in Spanish.

Well, maybe not, but try and imagine it anyway.

http://www.azuayesfiesta.com/

Cuenca is in the province of Azuay and the motto for the regional tourism office loosely translates into "We are a party and there's one every Thursday through Sunday, somewhere!"

The screen grab above isn't very good, but it's a guy running around in a cow costume shooting roman candles out of his face. So, they have those at these weekly fiestas and then they like to build big bamboo castles covered in more fireworks and set them off, as well.

When castles burn hot

and vaca locos fire snot

evenings blaze away.

I realize I've shown you "Castillos" like these before in earlier postings, but no two are alike and people are always settting them off in different parts of town.

Add to that, families pay for them on their own and they're expensive...kind of like the ultimate poorman's performance art, so to my way of thinking they deserve a second look.

The other thing the pyromaniacal citizens do which isn't as dramatic, but in its own way even more spectacular, is light off these "Globos" or hot air balloons.

Again, they make these globos and castillos themselves with a lot of time, effort and money; only to quickly see it all go up in smoke...literally and figuratively.

However, they're a spectacular sight.

The globo events usually occur around 8:30 or so and I've happen to walk out on my balcony and see something quite remarkable. They are lit off, one after another in rapid succession and they start rising up in the early evening sky. Then, the prevailing breeze catches them and starts moving them out single file in a line like gigantic fireflies marching off in a parade to who knows where. Eventually, there can be 50 or more of them. The lower ones being very big and those at higher altitudes getting smaller and smaller. They merge in with the tropical stars until they are finally at their zenith when their paper skin catches on fire and they fall like meteors, one after the other.

After an hour or so of this, the show ends and I go to bed.