2024 arrived with a bang!

Happy New Year everybody! How was your New Year's eve? 

Ours was fun, A LOT of fun! For New Year's eve, we wanted to spend our time in Quenca (the third largest and most beautiful city in Ecuador) because it has New Year's traditions, like no other place on earth! Let me explain what I mean.  Each neighbourhood does a huge display of large papier mache models e.g. ex- or current politicians, famous people, celebrities, even people from mafia or illegal organisations. There is also a lot of dancing and music on the streets, basically like a giant city street party. At the change of year, they burn all the papier mache models symbolising the end of the old year and the start of the new.

Knowing this tradition, we walked around the city in the early evening to see as many neighbourhood displays and street parties as possible. We walked around several of them and saw models varying from famous stories (like the Arabian Nights) or artists (Michael Jackson) to famous people from Ecuador (displays that were making fun of banks and celebrities and politicians and the mafia). They were all fantastic! The paper macher models reminded me of the ones in Lewes that are stuffed full of fireworks on Bonfire night but of course these ones were not moving in a parade, people walked around different displays on the streets instead.

The main question was: which should we stay at for the burning at the change of the year?

At the end, we decided to visit some of the more local ones and we were right to do so as our local street party was large and very festive with huge papier mache models, people dancing and letting off fireworks. So we decided that this was the place to be! We bought some fireworks and some bangers and soon we were making each other jump, well Ismene more than me!

Yoshi with his bum on fire "yaaaaaaaaar"

At midnight loads of people set off fireworks and burned their models. People were also started jumping over the fires made by burning the smaller displays. At the end of the night, we also jumped over other people's fires and pressed on by the excitement we stayed up until 1am! A personal record for Ismene and I, that's for sure!

All in all, a brilliant night!