Why Ecuadorian New Years Is Better

First of all, there is no giant glowing ball here. What is that about anyway?

More importantly, this is how Ecuadorians celebrate:

They buy papermache dolls of all sizes (baby to adult) and then you write a list of all the bad things that happened this year you want to get rid of, and then at midnight you burn the dolls and throw your lists in. Additionally one taxi driver told us to have money in our hand at 12 so we would have prosperity in the year, to take our suitcase on a little walk around the house so we would travel during the year, and to eat 12 grapes. We haven’t figured out why/what that means, but Aaron did it just to be sure. I think he really just likes grapes.

We called the Roseros yesterday morning to see if they wanted to have a BBQ. They told us there was left over budget so why didn’t we have a big BBQ party with all the volunteers? Sounded good. So Aaron BBQed some delicious steaks and chickens and veggies, and everyone’s mouthes and tummies were happy. Later we walked around looking at everyone’s munecas (dolls to be burnt). We came home and played some violent games, and then sat around trying not to fall asleep.

One neighbor made a cool transformer

Another just bought “themselves” they told me

Later we made our lists, and Rodrigo and Ismael made another muneca because Rodrigo wanted to burn as many things as possible.

Our Munecas to burn. Rodrigo & Ishy made the one on the left.

At 11:45 we went outside and the neighbors had already started their munecas burning. We started ours soon after and since no one knew the exact time, we just started counting. (There were already fireworks everywhere and some clocks said it was past time, some said early, so who knows) We then lit sparklers and watched the fireworks all over, and more neighbors burning their munecas.

I have to back up and say the couple days before there were all the munecas for sale on the sides of the road, and they looked a lot like piles of dead bodies. But the good part was the car we saw with two strapped to the hood, and the several cars and buses with little ones tied to the grill. Something I didn’t know until last night was lots of them have fireworks inside. That’s not an especially good idea in my mind, Aaron said firecrackers would probably have been ok, and that’s true. But ones that shoot out at random angles, really? Are you asking to loose an eye?

When we were ready to go home no taxis were working so the Roseros were ultra-nice and drove us. It looked better than Aaron thought, but I thought it looked like a riot or war zone. Burning things in the middle of the road every several feet, smoke, explosions, people out yelling (ok really they were just drunk), some roads blocked off, etc. It was a pretty great night.