Los Indianos

Author and friend in Los Indianos, Santa Cruz de la Palma

In Santa Cruz de la Palma, the highlight of Carnival is Powder Night - Los Indianos. This commemorates the people who emigrated from La Palma in the 1940s to 1970s and especially those who came back rich.

An Elegant Lady

Anyone can join in the parade. You just dress up in white, maybe have a suitcase full of Monopoly money, and for some reason throw vast quantities of talc at each other.
When I say "vast", the town hall gives out something like six tons of it to people in the parade, and one supermarket was selling 25 kg sacks.

A Not-so-Elegant Lady

When I lived in Santa Cruz, you could follow the progress of the parade by the cloud of talc drifting above the four-storey buildings on the route. Once the parade finishes, there's dancing in the street (of course) and a fun fair, which my son loves. Not surprisingly, we had a great time.

Batucada (percussion) in the Plaza España

Carnival

Yay! It's carnival, and I get sometime off for fun. (Actually I had to take time off work, because my son's off school, but I felt overdue for a break anyway.)

So the house is a little tidier, and I've finally sent off photos I promised to send weeks ago, and I've mended stuff that's been broken for over a month. And I got to see the kids' parade and the big Los Indianos parade (see the blog about La Palma.) On Thursday my friends come back from El Hierro, and they're taking my son to their house overnight so I can work Thursday and Friday. They're even bringing him back on Friday afternoon, and then we're all going to the sardine's funeral together.

That's right. Carnival ends with a funeral for a sardine. It's totally mad and I love it. (More details here.)

An Unusual Tree

I'm getting a little more organised. Over the weekend I managed to get the last of the Christmas cards in the post and to cook industrial quantities of lentils and chicken stew, so I've got ready meals in the freezer.

Last night I managed to get to yoga. Only three students turned up, so the teacher asked what we wanted to do. I said, "Relaxation," since my head was buzzing with everything I need to get done. The other two said, "Stretching."

So of course we did stretching. But since it was rather cold, it had to be energetic stretching to warm us up. And since the other two are far more advanced than I am, a lot of it was stuff I couldn't do at all. And boy did I ache this morning!

On the other hand, it reminded me that I used to have almost that much trouble with stuff I can do now, so obviously I've made more progress than I realised. I'm now merely very bad at yoga, instead of absolutely terrible.

The Christmas decorations are up in Santa Cruz, and most of the villages too. I particularly liked this Christmas "tree" outside a shop on the main street in Santa Cruz. It's made from the dead flower stalk of an agarve plant.