St. Somebody's Day

We took the bus into town again and people who know these things said we should get off the bus "right here", in the middle on one of the tunnels.  Lo and behold, the stairway was right there, and following our leader we appeared into the sunlight right at the steps of the major cathedral in Guanajuato.  We looked around for awhile and at a side door were a few old caballeros working on a litter for the evenings' parade in honor of St. Somebody.  The numbers on the rails tell where each of the 36 hombres stand to shoulder the litter (which is burdened with a statue, flowers and candelabras) and haul it here and there along the parade route.

This gentleman answered our questions about what in the hell was going on and I felt obliged to tell him "Yo gusto sus espanol por que esta es despacio por nosotros gringos," which may or may not mean 'I like your Spanish because it is slow for us idiots'.  He took the time to tell us all about the festival, the components which came from Spain, and which were crafted here in Mexico, I think.  It was all very interesting, I think.  I missed most of it, but the gentleman was enjoying telling us all about it so we listened and picked up a little information.  But we missed what the occasion was in celebration of, and googling the date and place helps not at all.  St. Somebody's Day.

 We heard a commotion and looked down into the street.  There was another litter with a brass band and vaqueros mounted on their caballos.  Hombres played horns and ninos beat the drums and we took pictures.

The nice slow speaking gentleman had told us to stick around because at 6pm there would be a parade with the litter they were working on leading the way.  A parade like this one, which occurred about 11am, was a smaller parade with a smaller litter and statue than the one in the evening, but it was all the same to us.  Holy water was sprinkled, vaqueros rode their second best horses and the second best band played, or more accurately pounded on their drums and blew their horns.  This litter was carried by about a dozen hombres.  The litter which we saw earlier was probably twice or three times this size and, as I said, carried by 36.

Then we rode the funicular up to the statue of Pipila, who is a real historical figure in Mexico's history.  This was about the third or fourth statue of this Mexican Revolutionary hero we had seen in our journey.  It was of granite and the others in San Miguel and elsewhere were in bronze.  More impressive than the statue, which was impressive no doubt, was the view of the city.  This photo was the second (or middle) of three photos that I took to encompass the view.  The cathedral is the large yelllow building in the center of the photo.