April 16 - Faculty Nazerenos

This morning when I headed out to school, I stopped in to check on the one of the squares that is filled with bleachers and chairs.  There were a number of people walking the rows - wiping down seats and picking up trash.  When I got out of class and returned, almost four hours later, there were only two people left cleaning the bleachers.  I liked this guy who was using a leaf blower to clear out the last bits of debris under and between every chair. 

They really do a lot of cleaning each early morning but one thing that they don't manage to clean is the wax that covers the streets where thousands of Nazarenos have dripped from their candles.  This is just the street between our house and the bridge.  The streets down near the cathedral are like sheets of wax.  It makes the cars sound very funny on the road, and I imagine breaking feels very different.

This evening I only went to see a couple of hours of processions, I wanted to get home in time to pack for Budapest before going to bed since I am leaving directly from class tomorrow.

One that was very interesting was the one that starts and ends not at a church but at the main building of the University of Sevilla.  It has two pasos which were both beautiful.  The "Christ" pasos are all very different and often depict part of the story of the Passion, but to me the "Virgin" pasos are very similar.  They are still beautiful, of course, but I have a hard time telling many of them apart.  Of course many of the locals have their favorite versions of the Virgin and to them they are nothing alike.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was that the Nazarenos for this procession walked in groups with each group carrying a small identifying banner and unlike some of the processions the banners didn't have names like "Nazarenos del Santisimo Cristo de la Fundacion" but instead had names like "Facultad de Ciencias" (Department of Science) and "Facultad de Farmacia" (Department of Pharmacy).  This is, of course, a Catholic exercise, but it was interesting to see so many people identified by their roles at the university coming together to form a brotherhood of nearly 1400 Nazarnos.  It is just one more example of how the overwhelming majority of people in Spain identify as Catholic (not always practicing Catholics, but Catholic nonetheless).

Tomorrow we head out to Budapest.  Hopefully we are able to navigate without much trouble to the airport.  It will be fun to see how the city has changed in the years since we lived there.