Don Juan

I had a really interesting experience last night - my Spanish teacher, Silvia, invited me to a play "Don Juan Tenorio", the story of the famous lover and heartbreaker. They do it every year around the time of Halloween and All Souls Day, since it involves love, betrayal, death, and spirits returning from the grave. And it was held in a cemetery. Yes, a cemetery!! At first I thought it would be kind of creepy, but it ended up being so neat. There is a huge, beautiful cemetery in Central Lima where a lot of famous Peruvians are buried. As a side note, cemeteries in South America are much different than in the US. Lots of people are buried above ground in these elaborate tombs that look like little buildings. And the ones that are buried underground are buried in crypts where you have to go down a set of stairs to get to it, and there is usually an elaborate marble statue or some sort of marker on it above ground. I didn't bring my camera last night and I know my descriptions aren't great, but hopefully you can sort of picture what I am talking about. So this cemetery has tons of these very large, fancy, beautiful tombs and crypts and they use them basically as the staging for this play. The play has 3 parts and each part takes place in a different area of the cemetery. They use some flat tombs as stages and put candles everywhere to light it. It was really incredible. The entire play was in Spanish, of course, but Silvia was there translating for me, and she had given me a printout of the story in English to read ahead of time. I thought I would be freaked out by being in a cemetery at night, but it was really beautiful. The actors were amazing, they wore gorgeous costumes, and it was so cool to see how they used the setting in the play. It was really clever. Definitely an interesting, Lima-only experience.