The Birthday Party

This has a small back-story. Our friend, neighbor and cleaning woman, Debora, always brings her daughter Kimberly with her when she cleans the house. Indra has grown quite fond of Kimberly and last year she was invited to the little girl's birthday party. It was held in a tiny house and it was very crowded. This year, Indra volunteered this house for the festivities.

Thursday night was set as the date, and that day Debra started delivering the party supplies first thing in the morning.

Including Snow White, the pinata...

Later, Kimberly arrived to help decorate and set things up. Indra swung into action.

Let the decorating begin!

We didn't really know how many to expect, but when a pickup truck arrived and dropped off 50 folding chairs and two gigantic steel tables, we had an idea that this fiesta was going to be big.

It's not like in the U.S. where you drop off your child and come back later to pick them up. These children arrived with their moms, dads, siblings, aunts, grandmas, babies, everyone turns out.

We had everything set up in the back, but as it got darker the consensus was to move everything into the front yard where we have better outdoor lighting.

We figured there had to be 40 kids and about as many adults.

Of course there was food. The main dish was a huge pot of spaghetti and a lot of small sandwiches. And a cake!

The last official act of the evening was the Snow White pinata....Here she is posing with the birthday girl, 11 years old.

I was under the impression that the kids would be blindfolded, given a big stick, and start taking whacks at it. Instead, each was given a turn to pummel poor Snow with their fists. This proved to be ineffective and eventually Snow was ripped open and, to the shouts of "Aqui! Aqui!", the candy was thrown to the little ones.

As you can imagine, there was quite a bit of wreckage left over after people headed home. No problem as Debra and her crew took over and picked up everything. And the next day she came over and cleaned the downstairs. A fun and interesting evening.

More later,

Larry

The Morning Walk

Sometimes it's fun to take a camera along on one of our morning walks just to see what pops up.  That's what I did today.  We walked to where the marina opens into the Gulf...

We sat down to watch the fish jumping out of the water, and the fishermen heading out to make a living.  We enjoyed the fact that these boats carried two smaller boats on them...

And all the while we were observing, we were being observed....

These are the dreaded Giant Brain Sucking Lizards of the Yucatan and are quite harmless during the day.  In fact, when approached, they disappear into the rocks.  But at night, if one should find you sleeping, they silently creep up and....o.k., I'm making this part up.  They're harmless.

As are the pelicans.  We found this handsome fellow taking in the sun....

At the end of the road we were offered this nice look at the new Progreso-Chelem bridge which was built to cut the drive time between the two towns by about  30 minutes.

A nice way to spend a Saturday morning.

More later,

Larry