Alfombras de Aserrín

The long loved Latin American sawdust carpet tradition reached Copan Ruinas for the first time (and thankfully not the last time) last year! So here I am, it’s 5:30 in the morning, I just pulled an all nighter to help build the carpets. It’s the most amazing and awesome process. We started at 6pm. Actually, I started at 7pm or so cause I was finishing watching the Honduras Olympic qualifier soccer match with Guatemala (Honduras won on penalties 6-5 and is in the Olympics!). So from 7pm to 5am I worked with only about 5 breaks for coffee and 10 breaks for the bathroom… coffee runs through ya, am I right?:)
Ok, so we first make a layer of sawdust over the cobblestone street, flatten it with 2x4’s, stomp it down on top of cardboard. Then lay down the cardboard molds over the top of the first layer…put colored sawdust on top of the original layer to make the picture, then press it down again with cardboard, and there you have it, beautiful sawdust carpets which will only last a couple hours until the procession and drunks destroy it. We had no problems with drunks destroying the carpet tonight, just drunks yelling at us, particularly any gringos helping (like me!). We had a couple of stupid dogs run through the middle of the sawdust carpets after we had finished parts of them, that was a very not-high-light of the evening. I already hate the dogs here, but they aren’t climbing up my list of most liked animals in the world quickly with behavior like that.:) At the start tourists were lined up all over the street to see what we were doing and taking pictures. Then they slowly left and we were left with like 50 people working on the carpets….slowly the numbers got less and less until at the end about 10 of us were left, maybe 15 or so. That was fun to be one of the last survivors, and I got an invitation to help next year (they said, “Hay que contratarlo el siguiente año también!” Which means, “we need to get him a contract next year!”). Ok, I’m going to go take pictures of our work now and hopefully later they will be put online. Hasta later gang!