New Years Evening

8:30pm

  It is the last day of the year and the clock is crawling slowly towards midnight.In the middle of the street a Santa Claus Piñata waits for his inevitable end.  With the Año  Nuevo still 3 hours away, our neighbours are starting to seriously crank the volume all the way to eleven!!

Smoke pours down the street from the various i.e.d’s that make up much of the evenings entertainment.

 Across the way from the hotel, a neighbour has a set (4) of speakers stacked up that would not look out of place at a Pearl Jam concert.

The evening commenced with a massive downpour, which started around 5pm and continues for a good hour and a half, settling down the dust and dropping the temperature several degrees.

 Once the deluge had ended we set off for the town centre. On the Calzada, waiters were mopping up the pools of water, wiping down chairs and setting tables outside for the evening meal

  Dinner tonight was at La Gran Francia, one of the more “deluxe” hotels bordering the Parque Central. From a balcony overlooking the street, the table offered a birds eye, or rather a bat’s eye, view of the street below. Out of the darkness the small creatures flashed by, occasionally zooming through the seating area and into the depths of the hotel.

 What might have been a perfect meal was marred by the fact that the main course was lukewarm rather than hot.

  Returning to the hotel after my meal I found myself feeling somewhat queasy and tired- too much sun or a touch of food poisoning? – so I decided to lay down and quickly drifted off to sleep.

11:40pm

  I awoke to find myself in a nightmare worthy of a Tom Waits tune. Smoke was leaking into the bedroom and outside, a noise that barely resembled music brought me back to consciousness. After laying awake for a few minutes, I decided to go out and record the scene to prove to myself that I wasn’t still dreaming. The band, using that term loosely, consisted of 6 “musicians” –brass, percussion and sousaphone wandering the street and “entertaining” everyone. In the background firecrackers exploded, coloured fireworks lit up the sky and smoke seemed to roll along the street, The entire population of the street was either watching or involved in the production of the spectacle that appeared before me.

  The closer it got to midnight the smokier it got and the louder and more intense the fireworks display. At one point I experienced a percussion blast that was so powerful that I wondered if I had been transported to a war zone.

 The racket continued up until the stroke of midnight, neither climaxing nor stopping. No countdown to 12 midnight, no midnight toasts or kisses, no balloons falling from the sky, no party favours- just an ongoing stream of fireworks explosions, smoke and light which eventually faded to a dull roar at around 2am. The racket actually continued until close to 6am but the front doors of the hotel were closed around 2, thus deadening the street noise and allowing us the chance to at least doze off occasionally.