We were wiped out after waking up at 4:30 AM yesterday morning to send off our cousins and Jason's sister and husband. No one in our family was going to stay awake until midnight (despite the constant bombs and fire-crackers going off all over town). The kids went to sleep at 7:30 PM, adults at 9:30 PM. We set our alarm for 11:30 PM. So, after dragging the kids from bed and heading to the street, we found pretty much all our neighbors out of their houses. The wood-fire blaze was already burning on the street and a young boy was throwing fire-crackers in the heat. Most of the adults were happy and drinking mescal (Oaxacan spirits, made from a local succulant), though not drunk.
As soon as the woman across the way spotted us, she warmly invited us to join her party. She insisted that we sit down and gave us bbqued meat, noodles, radishes, salsa and bean-covered tortillas, toasted on the fire. We were handed a special holiday drink made from fruit and sugar cane...you suck the sugar out of the cane after you drink the juice. She offered a variety of spirits.
The kids hiked up to our roof, to better see the action and avoid the constant invitations to eat and drink. They're pictured above.
At the stroke of midnight, fireworks erupted all over town. The old fella, the year 2007 was thrown into the fire and burned to a crisp, but the strangest tradition and most insane, was the toro loco. This bad boy is pictured above, looks a bit like a bull, made of sticks and bamboo, he sports these wheels on the side that are loaded with bottle rockets and other flaming fireworks. Then, the fire-crackers are lit, this lucky guy puts the thing on his head, and he runs around the street to the delight of all the bystanders. Notice the safety features on the guy and the bull. The guy has pulled his jeans jacket over his head, so his hair doesn't catch fire and the bull has long pieces of cardboard on each side so that the sparks zing down diagonally to the ground instead of landing on his host's head. I wonder how you get picked for this assignment. Perhaps he didn't send out his Christmas cards on time this year.
So, we woke up, ate, rang in 2008, watched the toro loco and said good night to our neighbors. The wildness continued until about 5:30 AM this morning and then all was quiet. It's a New Year's party we'll never forget.
2 comments:
Amazing, Susi. Thanks for sharing this. Sounds like a fun, community-based and appropriately symbolic way to bring in the New Year . . . much as the parades were in the Zocalo on Christmas Eve.
While I was taking those photos, Jason was in the neighbor's yard listening to the old timers telling various tales of how this or that cousin had "lost an eye", "burned a foot" or "lost partial hearing" while carrying the toro loco...Too bad no one decided to warn the guy with the jeans jacket.
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