Wild Weekend of Tacna Day

Last Friday marked 80 years of Tacna rejoining the republic of Peru after a little interlude (of about fifty years) as part of Chile. It ended up being a pretty wild weekend because of this, and it almost felt like a minivacation because we stopped with classes at 11 am on Thursday (and everyday I teach from 11 to the end of the day so I missed a lot of class) in order to have a little celebration in the school. Here is a little day-by-day breakdown, with photos to come if I can figure out how to get around the password protection they have put up on these computers.
Thursday: The ceremony at school was definitely a little interesting bit of the whole weekend. The kids mached in with the flag, but dressed up as citizens of the city from 1929. People threw the typical Tacna flower, the bugambilla, and we all sang the national anthem (which I have memorized by now and I am quite proud of). The secondary students read some poetry from famous poets of the city and danced a polka (I have no idea how this became a typical dance of here, but I found it quite funny and enjoyed the way the boys got to just basically rock back and forth while holding their suit jackets). Afterwards, we shared some picante - a typical Tacneno dish that has cow´s stomach in it. Apparently it comes from the time of the Chilean occupation when the Chileans would take all the good cow´s meat for themselves and give the local people the stomach to eat, and so they cooked it with a ton of peppers and a thick sauce to make it less disgusting. Now it is the dish of local pride - funny how that works, no?
Other highlights of the day were a three to four hour school meeting where each person individually talked about their thoughts of how the school has been since the fire (the director made his monthly trip down from Lima and it was the first time he was around since the fire), and going out at night to celebrate a friend´s birthday. The band played 80s rock and randomly at like 1245 a military procession passed by outside on the main street.
Friday: Big old parade that was proceeded by lots of different organizations making these ¨carpets¨ along the parade root. Using different colored sawdust and flowers, they basically made these elaborate designs on the ground (I will put up pictures when I can), and until the big giant flag processed down, no one could step on them (so the first few groups had to crowd the sidewalks and step carefully as they paraded down to the main plaza). The highlight of the parade was a huge flag, followed by all the local politicians - and actually as it stopped for a second by us, Cara´s host family (I was watching it with them) rushed out onto the street
to serve a toast (or brindis as it is called here) to the main characters. Then there were a number of bands and many different groups from all the municipalities. And if one group was parading down without marching, the crowd would literally boo them and get angry (which I found quite humorous).
Also, I saw across the street a friend who had hosted us for lunch last weekend (and used to be in the military and is an older guy with tons and tons of Tacna pride. In fact, the week before at his luncheon, he shot his gun off into the air after singing the Tacna anthem and yelling Viva Tacna), and he shouted ¨Que viva las mujeres tacnenas¨(¨Long live the Tacnena Women¨). He then, using only improvised sin language, motioned to me that I needed to marry a woman from Tacna. He was quite forceful about it and everytime we made eye contact across the parade, he would do it again. He might have been a touch drunk and after seeing him with the gun last week, I figured it was better to just keep rolling with the joke and appease him.
Finally, the parade ended with all the military marching, from the military schools (not so intimidating) to the cavalary (not intimidating to me, but some people definitely backed away from the parade when the horse´s came down) to the commandos all painted up and armed to the teeth (very intimidating to me). I went with Nate and my host family to have lunch and we had some good picante and some delicious arroz con pollo (chicken with rice, but its a green rice that is super delicious).
Ok, so I will finish up the rest of the weekend later since I probably should get off to school now.