Comodoro Py is 45km north-east from us and every year holds the Dried Chorizo Festival. It’s a mixture of traditional dance demonstrations, horse riding competitions, dried chorizo competition and market stalls. We were lucky to be given a lift with Jamie and Lucy as there’s no public transport out to Comodoro Py.
The
horse riding competition is a hundred metre track where riders weave in and out
of markers twice then sprint to the finish line. Penalties are given if you knock one of the
barrels over. The starting line is a
furrow gouged in the ground and the more the horses compete the more excited
the become and the harder it is to have both horses stand close to the starting
line. Through a series of heats, the
race is eventually down to the final two.
One of the horses was having troubles lining up for the race and two
handlers tried to corral it into position using their bodies. Then they grabbed the horse’s ear to try and
control it and finally they applied a twitch to the horse’s upper lip. A twitch looks like a nut cracker. This was uncomfortable for
us to watch so we can't imagine how the horse felt. Our friends told us that it’s more
conducive to walk both horses around until they are in a similar position for starting the race.
The town
centre was closed to traffic and a giant asado was set up to
cook endless amounts of chorri pan, beef and pork. There was one line to pay for the meal and a
second line to pick up the food with tickets from the first line. Talluah and I used our separate DNA to be in
two places at once. I lined up to pay
and she lined up to collect the meal.
Once I paid I gave her the tickets for the food. While she was waiting in line she explained
to some people where you had to go to pay and how we were doing it. They liked the idea and followed our method.
As we
were leaving a procession of vintage tractors was preparing to join a parade from a
farm shed by driving about 500 metres along a road that had cars parked bumper
to bumper on either side. The final
tractor to leave was a combine harvester with a blade on the front that, to the
untrained eye, looked too wide for the street.
However, the desire to join in the parade caused some spatial reasoning blindness. At the very first car the tractor driver
realised that he wasn’t going to fit. I
think the driver deduced that the fault wasn’t that his blade was too wide but
the cars were parked to close. A group
of men tried to manhandle the cars out of the way. One down, 264 more to go until the
showgrounds. We left before we saw what
they planned to do with the truck parked on the street.
No comments:
Post a Comment