When I got back Dublin on Saturday afternoon I hopped off the airport bus to this sight: My first encounter with Semana Santa. I missed all the big events from this week in Sevilla, which include pasos (parades) of all the saints every day of the week, lasting from dusk until dawn, with smaller pasos during the day, involving kids and the elderly alike. People regard their respective saints' pasos as the most reverent of sights one can see. While I traveled out of town for this week, the hotel rates skyrocketed in Sevilla from Saturday until the following Sunday, Easter, and I realized upon getting off this airport bus that it had officially marked the beginning of spring (and the start of the tourist season). The sun was blazing, and I sweated on my walk back to the apartment for first time all semester, and I'm not complaining at all. I thought that the parade I saw was pretty eventful, but once I sat down to a lunch of liver and rice (welcome home, Maggie), Cristina told me how much I'd missed out on. Apparently Easter weekend is the most boring of all the pasos, and that all the really impressive sights were to be caught early in the week of Semana Santa. She actually did a pretty good job of making me feel bad about missing out on that aspect of her culture, but that is neither here nor there. The rest of my Saturday was relaxing. I tried to run a little bit, I unpacked, blogged, did a yoga video from YouTube, and skyped my parents and grandfather after his surprise birthday party. That was definitely the highlight of the day! I so badly wished my flight from Dublin were a super high-speed one back to Charlotte for the day to have seen his face when 30 of his friends were at my house to surprise him, wishing him a happy *75th* birthday :). I'll just have to celebrate his half birthday with him when I get home! But in the mean time the long skype session did the trick. I also went with Cristina and her friend Marisol to see el paso del Virgen del Sol near our house (mostly in an attempt to get back on her good side for missing the entire week).
This extremely heavy and heavily-decorated construction is held up by a group of men that walk perfectly in sync with each other and to the tune of the trumpets (? I don't know instruments) through the narrow streets of Sevilla
So that was Saturday, the day before Easter. And did you know? Time change over here happens on Easter Sunday, not before, like in the U.S.? So I lost 2 hours between the time change and the hour change from the UK to Spain. But I did have to argue the Spring Forward/Fall Back concept to Cristina's friend, Marisol, as she was convinced that we went back an hour at 2 am that morning. At first I tried using the saying "spring forward, fall back" but quickly realized the words for Spring and Fall don't mean the same thing as "moving forward and moving back" in Spanish like they do in English...and do you know how hard it is to explain that kind of play on words in Spanish when it doesn't mean a single thing to a Spaniard? Well anyways I had to backtrack and just say "I'm pretty sure we go forward one hour, we always have in the spring..." but she wasn't budging. "NO NO NO NO NO NO you can ask ANYONE here, it's one hour less, we go back ONE WHOLE HOUR, when it's 2am it will actually be 1!" (except all Spanish). Well. I just hope she wasn't late to anything on Sunday morning.
Speaking of Sunday morning, it was beyond strange to wake up at 11:30 am and no one being awake in the house. It was silent. I ate a bowl of oatmeal sent from the states and sent a few emails, trying to be productive and getting on top of the week of school coming up. I didn't even think about the fact that it was Easter until I talked to my dad later that afternoon. Even at lunch with Cristina we didn't talk about it. While Semana Santa is bigger than Christmas over here, the actual day of Easter is made the least fuss about. I couldn't remember the word Pascua which means Easter, and I asked her what this special day was called in Spanish. She had to think for a minute and then said "....dia de resureccion? no se." As in she didn't really know. Or care.
I really missed being at home on this day, probably more so than any specific day so far this semester. There's been times that I've felt a pang of homesickness for a specific food, or to do a specific thing, but never because I was missing out on a special day. So these two days in a row of missing my grandfather's birthday and missing out on the Easter celebration at my aunt's house was a bit of a double whammy. And I know I've just had desserts on desserts on desserts over the past week while traveling, but a little piece of me did want a solid chocolate Easter bunny sitting at the foot of my bed when I woke up in the morning. I can't find those anywhere here!
So I did something else, on a whim, after dinner. I rolled out my yoga mat in the little space between MC's bed and mine, and even had to move around the desk and chair a little to be able to roll it out all the way, but I wanted to do 40 sun salutations. I guess for the 40 days of lent I pretty much totally disregarded. It took me about an hour but halfway through I made up my own flow to break it up and on number 20 I switched from sun As to sun Bs. And as I was about 40 minutes through my practice I realized I had made up a whole class, completely off the top of my head. And when I finished it was past 12 so it wasn't even Easter anymore, but I still like to think of that hour as my church service for the day. I attempted to dedicate each salutation to a different person I thought of in the moment and wanted to send love to. Not a traditional way to celebrate the day, but it was my own and it turned the day into something a little more special for me. And I hope to continue working on self practice a little more every day! There's so much more to explore with it. And now that its no longer Easter I have to turn my attention to reading 4 philosophy books and preparing a presentation about women's rights in the European Union.
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