festival de la cueva

Guest post from Lucas:

First we were looking for necklaces in el centro but we didn’t buy any because then we heard drums and they were very loud. We came running over to the street. Then, we saw the drummers. It was six or seven drummers and behind them were hundreds of caballos. I liked this grey one the best:

After the hundreds of horses were gone, we went and bought necklaces. Here is a picture of mine:

Zeiva got a rainbow star but she didn’t want to wear it right away. Mine was 40 pesos (about US$4) and Zeiva’s was 40 pesos and all together it cost 80 pesos and mama paid a 100 peso bill and got 20 pesos back. There was a black one of the necklace that I bought and a brown one. I bought the yellow one. But mama liked the brown one more than the one I chose.

Guest post from Zeiva:

I got a star and it’s a rainbow and there is a rainbow in the star. There’s rosa and rosa and green and green. There’s amarillo, gold, naranja and naranja. Here is a picture of it:

Yes, indeed. We played tourist and bought some jewelry from the street vendors. We had walked down to el centro because I’d seen that the Festival de la Cueva was starting Saturday with a horse parade through town. I guess this weekend each year the majority of town goes up to the rocks, caves and cliffs that we see directly across from our house to honor San Ignacio de Loyola, who is apparently carved into one or two of the caves up there. Here’s some more of the parade:

After the horses we took a bus to the park we’ve been going to and the kids got a great workout on all the strange exercise equipment again. They also played on the regular kids’ climbers.

From there, we wandered up to a soccer field where we’d heard that games of university employees would take place on the weekends. We caught the last few minutes of the last game of the day right as it started to sprinkle. So we took shelter under a little building on the side of the field, and when it passed we wandered over to a tennis club and watched for a while. The courts are made of dirt and the kid in the photo below is smoothing out the dirt with a bar and trailing piece of canvas. After he smoothed everything out, another guy came along with a broom and swept away the dirt in tight little sweeps right along the white lines to reveal the court markings.

smoothing out the dirt tennis courts in between matches

To round out our sporty day, we walked back to the basketball court we’d found last weekend. This time we watched the end of one women’s game and the beginning of another. I was happy to have Zeiva watching some women play, since most everything we’ve seen here is always about boys or men.

Lucas playing futbol with the other kids during a time out. Zeiva hanging from the posts - once again, why is my kid the only one up there?!

We walked all the way back into the center of town and had some quesadillas at one of the little restaurants I’d been to on my own. Lucas tried two of the sauces on the table, and decided he really liked the green one but that the red one was too spicy.

Despite the fact that we spent the day watching activities more than doing them, we did walk a lot, so the kids were starting to fade. We grabbed a roasted chicken from a local shop and just as we were walking out our bus pulled up. We hopped on and spent an hour getting home because we spent the extra 30 minutes or so in yet another ridiculous two-way traffic backup on the narrow road to El Pípila. Zeiva complete zonked out on the way and ended up sleeping on the arm of the kind older woman sitting next to her.

Because I wanted to get all the meat off the chicken after dinner, I offered the kids the opportunity to watch a little Jungle Book before we went to bed. I’ve been tempted before, but have held out until now without resorting to screen time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my peace and quiet because the kids couldn’t make it through dinner without numerous warnings and chances and ended up losing the movie. Lucas solemnly advised that next time I surprise them with the movie instead of telling them about it before dinner because it got them too excited. I reminded him that, despite losing the movie, dinner was actually better than most days. They were so wild and misbehaved during dinner normally that there would never be a chance at surprise movie! He agreed and we decided they’d just have to try harder next time.

They were mostly asleep Saturday night when Martín the night watchman/gardener tapped on the door to point out the Festival de la Cueva. It was amazing – the pictures don’t do it justice because I don’t have a real tripod, but there were literally thousands of people carrying torches climbing the rocks. There were these rivers of lights and then torches all across the top of the outcrops. The middle area is the location of one of the caves and is all lit up with electrical lights. It was mesmerizing, and I didn’t want the kids to miss it. Zeiva was still half awake, but I woke Lucas and we opened the curtains and they marveled at all the torches for a while before going back to sleep.

The view of the Festival de la Cueva from our casita. All the little yellow lights - the "river" up along the left side and along the top - are people walking with torches.

That same view reflected back on the large glass doors of the big casa next door.

The kids spent all morning bickering about the most inane things, and so we were still here at lunchtime. We ate, and then the kids were having a truly great time playing legos together, with some extended imaginative play where they were buying and selling their creations to each other, talking about what times their shops opened and closed, what the costs were in dollars versus pesos, etc. The kind of stuff all the books say is solid gold in terms of social-emotional development (they can do it – my children won’t end up serial killers!). I gently nudged a couple of times but Lucas said, “we’re doing so well playing!” (has he been getting into my books?!) and I agreed and sat and read in the sun until 3 pm, when they decided they were ready. So despite my sense of dread that leaving for an adventure this late in the day was a mistake, we finally left to check out the festivities down at the base of the rocks.

one of the many routes to the festival

A major attraction - chicks of all different horribly artificial colors.  I spent most of the rest of the day explaining to the kids why there was no way we could bring a chick home, despite them being only $1. Tons of kids were buying them. The guy would put them - no joke - in a BLACK PLASTIC BAG, bite two or three holes out of the sides of the bag, and send them off. I'm pretty sure most of those parents were happy to buy them because they wouldn't actually make it home (many hours later) alive.

purple - my favorite color - we HAVE to buy it!

how could you possibly turn down this handsome GREEN chick?

i'm pretty sure the kid wielding the enormous knife and chopping furiously was about 8 years old

look close - those are yellow jackets everywhere

everyone had camped out here starting on saturday - the streets were all closed, everyone was cooking, eating and drinking under their tarps

at one point the bottleneck through the stalls got REALLY, REALLY tight. we weren't moving at all and I started feeling a little claustrophobic, like we were the human version of the traffic jams I keep talking about, except that one open parking spot was nowhere to be found. Zeiva started getting a little freaked, too, saying "i need to get out of here". it was hot, smelly, the ground was completely uneven dirt and rock, and we were being pushed around without actually being able to walk forward...stressful!

giant vats of mystery meat - i didn't get pictures of all the boiled chicken and pig feet that folks were gnawing on

REALLY yummy smelling breads

psychedelic train ride

truck ride

a pirate ship-style ride called the "dragon" - the kids were semi-terrified, semi-thrilled. afterwards Lucas was calling it the pirate ship (he's been on a similar one before) and Zeiva said, "no, it's the dragon" and I was caught off guard because I suddenly thought she could read way more than I realized (the thing just to the right of them in the photo is a huge DRAGON sign). So I asked how she knew and she said, "well it looked like a dragon." Duh...

ferris wheel

this is what it's like to try to get on a ride. there are no lines, no waiting your turn. when the ride stops, there's a mad rush of kids crushing each other, trying to get off as well as on for the next round. it was a little nerve-wracking given all the machinery and platforms that one could fall off of.

don't ask me what this creature is, but they enjoyed the roller-coaster part

they wanted to go on this ride, but I told them I'd have to go, too, because look at how these people are being thrown to the side of their car! they refused to let me go with them, so they had to choose something else. this picture also shows the degree of safety and protection around the rides. That block of wood in the bottom left is it, and there were about three of them around this particular ride, and it's the only ride I saw with anything at all blocking off the massive spinning metal. I was constantly grabbing the kids and yanking them off to the side because they were wandering around awe-struck without realizing that they could easily have their heads knocked off by these things or the people riding in them. can you tell I'm having a great time at the festival? 

I did like this - no electricity required!

ditto here - hand crank for the little swings that the kids chose for their last ride

some more of the action - i was a wet blanket when it came to the TWO-STORY trampolines!

our casita (as part of the big casa) is dead center in this view from the festival

they had bands going and everything. i couldn't tell if some of these were large family/friend groups under the tarps, or random wandering audiences, so it was a little awkward when Lucas and Zeiva just walked right in to watch the musicians. I didn't want to make it worse by taking a bunch of photos, but there were some full-on traditionally dressed mariachi bands and guys with enormous tubas and the whole deal. and yes, we stuck out like a sore thumb - I didn't see a single other gringo there.

It was a couple of hours that were fun for the kids (though mostly anxious for me). I paid for it in spades when we got home. All kinds of complaining about what was for dinner, lots of bickering about inane things and then Zeiva managed one of her full-on tantrums. She pulled it together briefly to Skype with her best buddy Rylee, but then threw herself back into it with twice as much gusto afterwards. Wahhh…

p.s. Django is always asking about burros, for some reason, and we keep telling him that we seem them often. So here are some we encountered over the weekend, just for you. Three more days – all of us are dying to see you!