New Year's eve

New Year's eve in Antigua! This write up is dedicated to Ron Horn and his love of fireworks! Fireworks going off literally everywhere, Guatemalans love their fireworks! And not just on the street, but ones that shoot way up in the sky just like the 4th of July, all evening long after dark. Unfortunately our camera did not capture at night what we saw, so I don't have alot of pictures to post here. We stayed a couple extra days in Antigua after the girls left as the city promised some great sounding activities! First off was some professional dancing out in the Central Park. These included some local dances from surrounding communities, as pictured below and finishing with ballet from the Nutcracker. The street with the 16th century arch pictured to above (sorry, I still haven't figured out how to turn these pictures with the software available to me here) had different traditional dances going on to live marimba music. These included some 12 foot tall giants, costumes over wooden frames with people concealed inside, to perhaps 2 dozen dancers all dressed as masked old ladies, some hobbling along with canes, to a group that danced with headgear equipped with fire crackers, rockets, and other dangerous fireworks all going off. We did not witness the last described group as it was later in the evening than we stayed and there are a significant number of dancers and people in the crowd that take home lasting memories of the dance, so we opted out.

In fact, for the first two dances we did see, the crowds were tremendously thick. The crowds around the dancing were tightly packed to the walls of the buildings lining the streets. Passing through one of the crowds make take 10 to 15 minutes of inching one's way, baby step by step. We wanted to see the old ladies costumes again, so we got into the thick of a crowd assembling to see them dance. Linda must have sensed the density of people was thicker than thick as she excused herself and headed for the end of the block. The kids and I were going to soon follow, but found ourselves plastered against a building's wall. It started getting hard to breathe and a couple of little kids around us were crying due to this craziness. Eventually, we detected a movement in the opposite direction we wanted to go to reunite with Linda, but went with the flow just to get out of that squeeze. We circled around the block and found Linda, what a relief!

Back at our room, we were in bed and some of us asleep when about 1130 pm, the pace, density of sound and light from fireworks, increased notably. Even though our room was at the edge of town, we became surrounded by sound and light as midnight approached. The last 15 minutes of sopund for 2008 can only be described as what Gettysburg must have sounded like in 1863. Unbelievable the amount of fireworks that had to be going off.

The next morning we awoke to a drummer walking the streets in commeration of the Holy Family's return to their home.