Diane: The guidebooks and promotional literature indicated that tonight would be a "mystical" experience. There were two big differences that I could see, neither mystical but both full of local color. One was that people spent all afternoon into the evening using flower petals and colored powders to create murals on the streets around the central plaza.
Each square sported a sponsor and a "flower painting".
These squares covered the streets. At night, the crowds moved from mural to mural appreciating the artwork, the skill, and the subject matter chosen.
The themes ranged from Catholic imagery to pretty designs to popular cultural icons.
Many of the nights preceding this one had at least one flower carpet. The nightly procession would walk right over it, utterly destroying it only minutes or hours after it had been created. I don't know if the underlying philosophy is the same, but there are undertones of Tibetan sand mandalas here. Several monks traveled from Tibet to Sarasota a couple of years ago. They spent a week creating an intricate piece of sand art, only to throw the whole thing into Sarasota Bay soon after it was completed.
This evening, after the procession came through trampling the intricate flower paintings, young children moved in with small plastic bags, filling them with the used flower petals. The desire to collect memorabilia must be fairly universal.
In addition to a large array of flower carpets there was also a vast array of music blaring from speakers on each side of the central plaza. Instead of having an army band and a small string section or a small vocal section, there were choruses and orchestras from different parts of Peru performing. It was almost a battle of the bands. As I moved around the plaza, the music at one side would compete with the music from the other side.
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