Dia del Locos Weekend: Saturday Part I

Dia del Locos is such a feast for the senses that it is going to get 2 blogs. This festival started to honor San Antonio de Padua, but in San Miguel it is often associated with the very popular, Día de los Locos. The festival and parade actually celebrate harvest and the Spring.

Our Saturday morning began by fireworks being set off at the San Antonio Church (only a few houses away from us) at 6 am. Charles and Owen ventured outside to check out the activities and saw that all the pews were taken out of the church so that they could have an outside church service. There were about one thousand people there that early in the morning and the little girls all had white dresses and the little boys wore tuxedos. We still don't know what that was all about.

When the fireworks stop, the bells start ringing. In all the churches in San Miguel, the bells are rung by hand. This is truly astonishing when you know just how often and for how long the bells are rung. In particular, on festival days the bells ring ALL THE TIME. This picture captures some of the people up on the bell towers.

All day there were dancers, music, and food vendors. At night, they set up this enormous stage and had a band and dancers.

I would remiss if I didn't mention the food vendors. We do know why Mexico is the 3rd largest (aka fattest) nation in the world. Everything is fried in tons of oil and the Mexicans like lots of sweets and sodas. Take a look at some of these food stands.


Churros: Boy, do these fried dough-like creations rolled in sugar taste delicious!

How about some of these pork rinds with hot sauce? A dieters nightmare!












My kids favorite is the cotton candy. Yummy!












They then started to erect this structure where they light the fireworks off from. The structure consists of circles and shapes and the shapes become all lit up and move in circles. To be fair, these fireworks are more like sparklers on speed...they are intense, colored, and move. These structures are huge and have ropes that are tied to trees so the structures are secure when they are being lit. It truly is a site to behold as they methodically light part after part of the structure. They light each part with a cigarette which I think it just hilarious.

You can see from these pictures all the work that goes into creating these castillos (fireworks).










At one point, Charles struck up this conversation with one of the guys responsible for building the structure. The guy was thrilled to talk with us and was just the cutest older man. Here he is posing for his picture.

Here is what some of the fireworks look like when they are set off from the structure.

They start lighting from the bottom and work their way up.

 It truly is an amazing amount of light and color.

The last firework to go off is at the very top of the structure. It looks like a disc and gets all lit up and then starts spinning faster and faster.  All of a sudden this disc just takes off like a rocket and shoots up into space leaving showers of sparks as it goes up.

What we didn't realize was that this way cool spaceship would not burn up, but rather come down somewhere. We looked up and saw the disc hurtling down towards us. Literally, this top of the firework landed 20 feet from us. Only in Mexico as we keep saying!

So fireworks at 6 am and fireworks at 10 pm for this day. Party on...

And this was only Day 1!