Festival parade through the parque central.
Sometimes your timing works out. After writing my last post, Corrinne and I hit the streets of Granada to do some sightseeing. It was market day, and many of the streets were packed. We also heard rumblings of a big festival, with Ernesto Cardenal being the guest of honor, but this was apparently the last day and we didn’t know where we’d be able to find any of the revelry.
We hit the streets, and the revelry found us.
Coming through the parque central, we started to hear drums and horns. We looked off to the southern corner of the park, and here came a gaggle of jugglers, hula-hoopers, a stilt walker, a small band, and multiple followers dancing in the streets. I’d been dealing with a mild stomachache, but that disappeared as soon as the parade showed up. And of course I thought of New Orleans.
There have been a lot of New Orleans touches along the trip so far, but this was the first one that made me feel like I was back there. We walked along in the parade and I kept expecting to look up and see someone I knew, a musician or an acrobat. Somebody who would tell me I’d taken a wrong turn at Rivas and had come back home. But this parade was all Nicaragua. It was the closing night of the big Granada arts festival, and as we gathered around the main stage, a man in a soot-stained tank top, welder’s goggles, and a hardhat walked up, carrying fuel fed torches on his body like the arms of a combustible spider.
This is what you wear when you do not want people to mess with you.
Then a band began to play, and the various artists from the festival did a thirty minute routine, incorporating dancers, acrobats (a twelve year-old kid did a particularly impressive aerial display), and the Fire Man—who not only carried the torches on his body, but had a hose rigged up to a fuel bottle on his back, so he could suck some fuel into his mouth and spit fire while walking along looking like Hell’s janitor.
By the time the band was done playing, we’d been watching the performers for a good 90 minutes. We went to a little cafe, watched the local crowds agonize over the Nicaraguan Baseball League Championship (Granada is in the final), then came back. But all that was on our minds yesterday was the parade, the artists, and the strange feeling of a place we knew reaching out to say hello.