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Day 183 - 2 January 2006 Boas Festas! the magical word of the new year BOAS FESTAS! (pronounced BO-ash Fesh-tash) now say that 10 times fast! I started to sound like boashfeshash, how ‘bout you? so the really cool thing about bein here is that the people are so affectionate and have no scruples about touching each other. in accordance with that, for the new year, everybody out in the street wishes everybody else Boas Festas (good parties, fun times, etc.) with the traditional handshake (male-male) or double cheek kiss (every other combo). I love it! but it just gets ridiculous on NYE. cuz EVERYBODY is doin to EVERYBODY. all in all, a good time. so here goes my explanation of Boas Festas, CV style. feel free to tag along. I spent new years with my friend anna and another volunteer and his girlfriend who lives in the next vila over from anna’s up the north. his town has all these exclusive parties that are always thrown and attended by the same folks. the party he got us into was a 3 nighter for only $25! and get this, started no earlier than 1:00 am. that’s right, do the math...a 1:00 am party for new years. right. so instead of celebrating the turning of the new year AT the party, we spent it (just like the rest of the town) in the street as kids were setting off big boom firecrackers that just made a loud one time BOOM! along with a few flares «ahem» "fireworks," while the younger kids lit socks filled with hay on fire and swung them around to make sparklers that fly about 15 feet in every radial direction. sound fun? it was for me of course with some level of danger flyin around (maybe that made it more exciting for me), and to top it off, a caravan 6 cars drove around the four blocks of congested main intersection continuously honkin their horns led by guess who? yes, the fire truck for the entire vila. let’s do that math again, lots of uncontrollable fireworks bein set off by uncontrollable kids in a crowd of folks (a good number of them tourists), with the only source of emergency extinguishing parading around town and thus incapacitated during the potentially most dangerously flammable moments of the old and new years. and I loved every moment of it. the great thing was after it became the new year, everybody in the street starts doin the handshake and double kiss to wish BOAS FESTAS to everybody. that is, of course, everybody except the terrified tourists crowding together and hiding for dear life on the one darkened street corner way over there.«pointing» oh well, sux for them. I’m getting my “BOAS FESTAS!” on with the locals. so after that, the parties commence all around town and our party had a buffet of finger foods and endless crappy Portuguese beer or CVean grogue or pontche or cortado (a mix of grogue and pontche). so needless to say, since anna & I didn’t really know how to dance the Pousada (basically the main style of dancing in CV), we just chatted, watched folks dance, drank, watched the few music videos they projected on the wall as a supplement to the dance music, then watched folks dance more as they drank more, and eventually took a quick lesson from our fellow PCV and his lady freind. it was fun. 3 crazy nights all with the 1:00am-daylight party schedule sure has gotten to me though. now I need to sleep during the morning and am super awake late late at night. hopefully I’ll bounce right back from it, but either way, it sure was a great time. <--- Christmas PCV style                próximo curso --->