This makes Putumayo look bad.

July 4, 2007
Sunday…
Sunday…. My memory is dim, but I will relate the best of what I can piece together… I went to Cordoba… a city of horseshoe arches and flowering patios…. Its all a blur though, no concrete chronology is in my mind.. I suppose I’ll write more of Cordoba when I visit again with my parents… the few hours I was there were too quick and too much to exactly reinstate here. I suppose what I am more interested in is African tribal dancing… something similar to an African putumayo concert I went to last semester….

My friend and I were taking a quiet night… We ordered a glass of vino tinto and lounged outside a bodega watching people walk by... However, our tranquil break was broken somewhere between midnight and twelve. A band of African drummers and dancers dressed in a rich tapestry of West African prints appeared, lumbering past us towards the busiest area of the plaza.
The tribe pitched camp, sat crossed legged, and began to drum. Louder and louder, singing as they propelled their arms downwards. Boom boom be-boom. The entire plaza filled with the rhythm of the sub-Sahara, and soon an enormous crowd encircled them…
After a while, we could stay still and felt compelled to see what was going on. We downed our wine and abandoned the bodega, and decided to take part in the commotion. A man was dancing, crouched over with his arms and hands tightly bound by a rope. He danced within the circle chanting softly in some unknown tongue. Nearby, the beat of the drums continued… Anxiously we waited… then from some odd corner of the crowd emerged a lanky fierce looking man with tangled hair and a piece of cloth.
He walked up to the bound man, and covered him with the cloth. The beat of the drums and singing continued… the wild haired man worked to its beat. The cloth began to raise, at first it just seemed as if the bound man was standing up, but soon the cloth was raising much higher than the man… 6 feet… 7 feet… 8 feet? It was absolutely absurd. Children were crying, people gasping. Magic. The chanting of the wild haired man, the incantations of the magician, abruptly stopped, and the sound of the drums slowed… The cloth feel inches from the ground… The magician pulled out the cloth and there stood the man with the ropes completely untangled, amist a roaring crowd.
I felt like I was in a street fair in the middle ages… It was as if I was witnessing some spontaneous traveling circus of sorts…
The next trick involved a man in a gruesome African mask. There was a brief pause from the magician trick and a man robed in palm leaves, hay, and an enormous and frightening mask waltzed into the center of the circle. His dance was crazy and exciting… A blend of hula, belly dancing, and the jumping of the Maasai people in Sudan. It seemed he was the western equivalent of a jester. He juggled for a bit, but people seemed moderately bored. So, he grabbed to bystanders from the crowd and ordered them to hold a rope out tautly in a horizontal manner. The drums and singing still persisting, he would race towards the rope acting as if he would jump and then stop abruptly. The drums would settle. And he would move it a few inches higher. He repeatedly did this until he would have had to been an Olympic athlete to have leaped over. We all prepared for some sad demise to the frightening harlequin.
He raced back, launched himself forward… then… lifted the rope above his head and snuck under. The crowd rippled with laughter at the trick. By this moment, the spectacle started to die down… It seems they were to continue later but the group was worn out.
We were worn out as well, and against my better judgement, I left to go to my home and prepare for a long next day.