Since arriving in Spain, I’ve been inundated with information about Semana Santa, a renowned holy festival in Sevilla, when over 200,000 extra people flood the city to see the pasos. Religious brotherhoods—hermandades and cofradías—organize the pasos, when members carry huge floats depicting the Passion or the Virgin. The members who aren’t underneath the paso (those members impress me to no end—the floats look like they weigh tons!) wear penitential robes, which have tall pointy hoods. And while I know these robes are a very old religious tradition, for most Americans it’s nearly impossible to look at them without having a brief kick in the stomach as you think you’re looking at a very bold member of the KKK. As hard as I tried to look at them in a different light, I felt pretty sacrilegious from the moment I left my house at the beginning of Semana Santa and jumped away from the first hermandad members I saw. That was just the beginning of my sacreligious-ness though, although I soon learned that many Spaniards aren’t extremely holy during holy week, either.
My friends and I had tried to dress somewhat conservatively, since it was a holy week after all, but it was hard to keep on our cardigans in the 90 degree weather under the Spanish sun (I swear the sun here is hotter than anywhere else I’ve traveled). We gritted our teeth and bared it though, thinking that once we got to the centro, where all of the festivities occurred, it would be inappropriate to bare shoulders or to let any cleavage peak out. However, when we arrived at the outskirts of the cathedral, we were shocked to see women in tiny skirts and shiny tank tops, or in leather pants and thigh high lace up boots. The majority of people looked very nice in longer skirts or dresses (and there was a plethora of adorable matching children running around—my favorite thing in Spain!), but I couldn’t believe the abundance of what I consider clubbing attire. So of course we pealed off our sweaters immediately and still were not showing the most skin by far.
Still, once we entered the masses of people, I couldn’t believe how hot it was or how many people managed to jam pack themselves into a few streets. We arrived pretty early for a paso and plopped ourselves down near the Cathedral on the curb, positive that we’d secured a prime paso-viewing position. We had about an hour before it was supposed to arrive, so we people-watched while we waited. In that time we saw: a deluge of scantily dressed women (including a few Snooki-esque hair bumps), a man pee on a tree next to the cathedral entrance, numerous people throw their trash into the bushes, a man drinking a bottle of beer, and several parents hit their children. It didn’t feel like a very sacred environment to me. Finally, the time for the paso to start arrived, and as much as we tried to stand our ground, we were shoved behind several rows of latecomers who decided it was their right to get front row seats. We sucked it up and tried to be polite, even as we got run over with strollers and waves of second hand smoke poured in our faces. The paso ran on Spanish time, meaning it started about 20 minutes late, but it was worth the wait, as the float was gorgeous. We enjoyed the music and procession, even if we got slight chills seeing lots of small children in white penitential robes.
However, we were very ready to leave by the time hundreds of musicians and robed people had passed us. The only problem was that everyone else was too. We tried to escape down side streets but everything was either blocked off by policemen or by another paso. It was impossible not to feel claustrophobic in a mob of sweaty Spaniards and tourists pushing against each other to get away from the Cathedral. Finally we found an outlet, but had to wait over 45 minutes for the mass of bodies to trickle through the narrow opening between pasos and still interested spectators. Meredith seriously contemplated feigning fainting, but the rest of us convinced her that we didn’t know enough Spanish to get ourselves out of that situation, and I’m still a little confused about how our health insurance works here.
When we finally emerged from the sweaty legion of onlookers, we were all pretty stressed and crabby. But we made it to the river and realized we were in Spain and didn’t have school for over a week so we couldn’t complain. This also meant that we should drink wine. Lots of wine. After all, Karlee reasoned, Jesus turned a lot of water into wine, didn’t he?
We went into OpenCor, the general store where we often buy our wine, and were delighted to discover that our favorite wine was on sale for 1.25 Euros! So we each bought a bottle and meandered over to the Torre del Oro, a popular botelloning (drinking in groups in the street) spot on the river. We were not alone in our desire to drink away the heat and our stress; although it was a Sunday, there were huge groups scattered all around the tower. Spain may be a Catholic country, but either they take the wine part of mass seriously or they’re Catholic in name only.
A group of what appeared to be middle school boys kept alternating between play fighting with each other (although some of it didn’t look too playful—one kid got thrown into the bushes, where lots of broken glass and bodily fluids reside, and another got kneed in the face) and hollering at us. The harassment isn’t unusual, so we just ignored it and figured they would get bored. But then they started coming up to us and asking for Fanta, which we wouldn’t give them. That made them quite irate, so they started approaching us in groups and insulting us in Spanish. We hadn’t had enough wine to think it was a good idea to verbally spar in Spanish with middle schoolers, so we started to pack up to move. They finally left and we felt like the more mature, classy women that we are.
We maintained our feeling of classiness until we realized we were on our last half-bottle of wine, and it was only 9:30—far too early to stop celebrating religious traditions. But then we looked at a phone and realized that it was actually 9:57. Vendors in Sevilla stop selling wine at 10:00. We looked at each other in horror. Karlee bolted off of her bench and declared that she could make it to OpenCor in 3 minutes. Then the question was, did we need one or two more bottles? Silly question, clearly we needed two more bottles. Meredith thrust money into her hand and Karlee ran off. I decided 30 seconds later that I should go with her. I sprinted after her, and timed a stoplight perfectly so I was actually ahead of her. The only problem was, I didn’t have any money. We ran parallel to each other, yelling across the street about the time. I waited at the next crosswalk for her and we flew into OpenCor together. I ran to the wine aisle and grabbed two more bottles, while Karlee panted/yelled at the store clerk, asking if we could still buy alcohol. We made it! We emerged victoriously from the store and strolled back to our friends, quite proud of ourselves.
We ended up getting sandwiches and going home about an hour later, but we certainly celebrated holy week, if a bit sacrilegiously. However, when we reflected the next morning, we realized that while we had been thrilled about our wine victory that night, we really didn’t need those extra two bottles.