Who knows?? Punos!

Last weekend we ventured to Puno, a 6 to 12 hour bus ride (depending on the bus company) southeast of Cuzco. Puno is the largest city on Lake Titicaca, and hosts "la festividad del la Virgin de la Candelaria". The virgin is the patron saint of Puno, and the festival includes a week of bands, traditional dances, and a lot of parties. It´s sort of like Peru's version of carnival. On Monday, we had prime seats for the parade thanks to the family who owns the hostel where we stayed. There were 73 different dance groups who traveled to Puno from Chile, Argentina, and the surrounding areas. Some of the groups had up to 2000 people. Therefore, the parade started at 8:30 am and was still going strong at 1 am. It would be hard to wait over 14 hours just to get to start dancing! However, everyone seemed to be having a grand time...

By the end of the weekend, we could recognize the different dances and their significance, and basically knew the music by heart. It was definitely a fun sight to see!

Our sweet seats. We had a little old lady who befriended us and told us all about the different dance groups. She also spent much of her time holding my leg...

             

 

They described these types of costumes as "beautifully ugly" because of the beautifully colored and designed clothing,
but ugly faced masks.

 

 

Different costumes are typical for different dances. There are dances mocking the Spanish "conquistadores", dances about the journey of the slaves from Africa, dances mocking Spanish womens´ dresses, dances to celebrate mother earth, and a dance called the Diablada (the devil). We´re not totally sure the significance of that dance, but the costumes were pretty neat



This costume is making fun of ladies of Spain with their large skirts.
The whole parade these women were flipping their skirts up almost
 over their heads! Hard work for so many hours!
 The men were dressed riding bulls that would run into them.



There were tons of these gorilla
 costumes with spiders on them.
 They looked really hot in there.

 

A couple of videos to make you feel like you were there with us:

We came to love and accept the pan flute over the weekend

Our military would not be caught dead doing anything like this