I’m cur­rently in Puerto Rico spend­ing the hol­i­days with my wife’s fam­ily. She and I spent a few days on Ponce, the city where we got mar­ried. On the night of Decem­ber 30th, we were in our 3rd floor room in the Hotel Melia when the fol­low­ing hap­pened at 11:19pm:

Need­less to say, this was a lit­tle dis­tract­ing, con­sid­er­ing these were going off right out­side our win­dow. I’ve been in Puerto Rico enough that this didn’t sur­prise me too much, but the Amer­i­can on the bal­cony next to us looked totally con­fused. This was pre­ceded by police sirens and extremely loud music. There was a flatbed trailer with a band­stand and a Puerto Rican band set up that was dri­ving through the square. While they were mov­ing there was pre-recorded Salsa play­ing. Once the trailer reached the town hall, they stopped and the announcer came on:

“This is a gift to the city of Ponce from the mayor! Enjoy 2010!”

And then the band began to play. Peo­ple were gath­er­ing in the square to watch, and we got dressed and ran down­stairs. We man­aged to catch the last two songs. I also man­aged to record the last one for your view­ing pleasure:

FYI, the song is called “Mañana Por La Mañana” and it is a Puerto Rican Plena. Can any­one out there imag­ine this hap­pen­ing in the states? The coolest part was that there were still peo­ple wan­der­ing around the town square, so by the time the group fin­ished there were a good num­ber of peo­ple check­ing it out.

On a related note, I’ve decided that New Year’s eve in Puerto Rico is way too much work. Here’s the list of things you have to do:

1) Drink Champagne

2) Eat twelve grapes at mid­night, for prosperity.

3) Throw a bowl of water over your shoul­der just after mid­night, to throw away all the bad things of the pre­vi­ous year.

4) Carry around a empty travel bag to insure safe trav­els for the new year (I can’t find any infor­ma­tion about this one, so it may just be my in-laws.)

The fir­ing of guns used to be a tra­di­tion, but there’s been a big pub­lic­ity cam­paign to try and stop this, due to the dan­ger of stray bul­lets. There were a whole lot of tele­vi­sion ads about it, with chil­dren hid­ing under lit­tle umbrel­las full of bul­let holes. So I spent the stroke of mid­night drink­ing cham­pagne, eat­ing grapes and throw­ing buck­ets of water all while car­ry­ing my travel bag and try­ing to dodge stray bul­lets. No won­der I’m so tired today.