Semana Santa

Holy Wednesday

It has been a busy week for Semanta Santa. This was the procession on Wednesday evening. Usually this is a huge procession but this year it did not include all the angels and women carrying symbols of Christ's last week before the crucification. This year four or five of the Santos from the Oratoria church were carried to the Stations of the Cross in the Centro.  We walked along with it part of the way and then we went to the Sunset Bar to watch the lights come on in town.

Holy Thursday

By the evening of  Holy Thursday, the town was filling up with tourist. There were some gringos but mostly they were Mexican tourists. The street in front of the Parroquia was full of balloon and toy sellers, food vendors and of course people. Also in the Plaza Civica there were rows and rows of food vendors. There would be no need for anyone to go hungry.

We visited all of the churches in the Centro along with a steady stream of tourists. Then we needed nourishment too. We went to The Restaurant at Sollano 16 and sat in the bar. We knew that we could have a glass of wine and nosh on some of The Restaurant's appetizers. What we didn't know is that Thursday has become Hamburger Night. The place was full and we watched these huge delicious looking burgers being served. It had been almost a year since we had been there and restaurants come and go in San Miguel so we weren't sure if they were still living up to their reputation. They definitely are. We will be going back soon to try out Hamburger Night.
Good Friday

Today, Good Friday, there were a number of events but as usual I stayed in my colonia and followed the procession from the San Antonio church through my neighborhood to the Stations of the Cross. It is a wonderful procession and I see some of my neighbors or people I know from the tiendas. It amazes me how it all gets coordinated. There are people distributing water, men who watch to see that all of the statues can clear the low electric lines, the families that put up and decorate for each Station of the Cross and plenty of people to take turns carrying the statues. Carrying these statues is no small matter. The procession takes about three hours, on rough cobble stone streets and in San Miguel there are some steep inclines to cover.

I photographed the Good Friday procession with the Lensbaby just to change things up a bit.

Rules are Made to Be Broken

I know, I know. You aren't suppose to cut off someone's head in a photograph. But when I saw these guys with plants where they should have had heads and feet, I just had to make the image. It gave me a little chuckle. Hope you get the humor too.

Gorditas

There are so many vendors who set up a little "kitchen" on the street and sell food. This vendor found a spot among the plant sellers in Parque Juarez and she was making gorditas with about 5 different fillings. She had a few chairs where you could sit down and eat but a gordita is a handy pocket filled with savory food. Definitely fast food that you can eat on the run.

Don Pollo

Don Pollo on Ancha de San Antonio sells roasted chickens along with some tortillas and chiles. When we first started buying chickens from him they were 30 or 35 pesos. Now they are 55 pesos and they are fairly small chickens. The cost of chickens has definitely gone up. Still, you need to be there by 4:00 PM or make another plan for Comida or Cena.

Like Chocolate

An email from my friend Steve Williams:
I'm always smitten by these feasts of color and soft glow of the lensbaby. It's visceral, like chocolate melting in my mouth.

What a lovely simile.

Plant Sale

This morning I walked over to Parque Juarez for the Candelaria Plant Sale. It is beautiful to walk the winding paths through the park past thousands of plants. Plants of all kinds. But what was even better was to have my camera and just get into seeing, and into a kind of flow where everything but the visual moment melts away. At one point I sat on some steps for a long time just watching what passed by. It was really quite magically. I came away refreshed, energerized and yet quite peaceful.

Composer - The New Lensbaby

Lensbaby? What the heck is that? Well a bunch of the images you have seen of mine, like the one above, are made with a Lensbaby lens on my digital camera. I bought one of the original Lensbabies back in 2004. It is a lens on a squeezable rubber tube. It is kind of like having a view camera that lets you adjust the plane of focus so that either everything is in focus or you can throw some parts of it out of focus.

Since 2004 they have come out with three other Lensbabies. The most recent one is called the Composer and it looks like a big improvement. The original one was hard to squeeze and hold at the point you wanted it to be while you also tripped the shutter on the camera. But the composer is kind of like a trackball that will hold in place. Take a look at it here. The other thing about it is that it has interchangeable lenses including one that is a plastic lens......Hello Holga! This new Baby is in demand and mine has been on back order but I just received notice that it has shipped with a double glass lens and a plastic lens. It will be waiting for me in December when we go to Texas.

I distinctly remember where I made this image....across the street from the San Juan de Dios church. I've wanted to go back and photograph it again but it is like it has disappeared. I can't find a terracotta wall and blue window anywhere along this street. Maybe it was just a gift from the Photo Gods on this January day in 2006.