Having Christmas Eve dinner!
Hello everyone and might I just say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
These past few weeks have been a bit crazy, almost 3 weeks ago now I got transferred to a new area. I am now in the north part of the city of Chiclayo in the city called Jose Leonardo Ortiz. Here I am much more in the city and a ton of things are different about what we do here than in my old area. My companion still isn't from the States. This time it is Elder Lopez and he is from Nicaragua!
Things have been going well here, and although when I came the work was a bit slow, we are working hard to pick things up and get things going again in our ward.
For Christmas, we got to use our Pday to Skype home and talk to our families, and because right now everyone is at the beach we changed our Pday to Thursday, so that's why you haven't heard from me.
But Christmas here was pretty good. The tradition in Peru for Christmas Eve is to have dinner super late, at like 11 and then go outside and light off a few fireworks at 12. Then go and blast loud music in the streets so nobody can sleep that night ( No--we couldn't sleep at all).
Then for the 25th there really isn't anything they do. They open up the presents, if there are any, and just play around and enjoy not working. When I told them about how Christmas is in the States everyone was appalled that we go to bed so early, and they didn't accept the excuse that it was because of Santa.
Then last night we had New Years Eve, also very very different from the States. Because I am pretty much on the equator, it is nice and warm here unlike in Colorado, so for New Years everyone is outside. Last night we got to see what the people do. A big tradition is to burn muñecos, or giant straw men at 12 midnight to say goodbye to the old year and all the bad things. Every family has their own scarecrow type thing, and will write the bad parts of the last year. Then at 12, everyone in the city lights it on fire and also lots of fire works. To watch this, we went up on our roof, and holy heck I couldn't believe the madness.
It seemed like a full on war zone, something that you would imagine a city being burned and taken over by pirates or by an army. Every street was lit up with the fire of the scarecrows, so there was smoke everywhere and every street had its own orangish glow. Then, because we are in a 3rd world country, everyone and their mom had Grade A fireworks and were losing their minds with those.
Looking across the skyline, there were fire works everywhere you looked. Out of every street, tons of fireworks were flying out and were going off right and left. It was super sweet, and really seemed like we were in the middle of a war zone! I decided that I will be spending all my next New Years in a 3rd world country like here from now on.
But sorry for the short email. On Monday I will describe my area much better and everything about it. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and is enjoying the New Year!!
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