Viva Mexico some more...

Ok, here it is the post-party post.

Friday night:

We went downtown Mérida (which by the way is the capital of the state of Yucatán. So that would the equivalent of going to Raleigh, the capital of NC) about 6 pm, which was way early for the festivities but we wanted to scope things out and see where the best places to see everything would be. It was raining when we got downtown and just getting dark so some of the pictures didn’t come out very well. But, you can see the buildings around the square all decorated.

There were kiosks to buy all of your Viva Mexico gear everywhere. Seems like everyone had a horn, a noise maker, face paint, AND a flag. We got a flag to wave around and it is now hanging on our wall.

From about 8pm on there was a big stage set up and a band playing. They were really good. Once the crowd got so big you couldn’t get close to the stage, you could still hear the music from the whole square because they had speakers everywhere. There were tons of people by about 10:30 so many you couldn’t walk around at all. At 11:00 or so the secretary came out and read the Declaration of Independence and then governor came out to give the greeting, which consisted of a call and response: secretary, Viva Mexico! crowd, Viva Mexico! secretary, Viva Hidalgo! crowd, Viva Hidalgo! you get the picture. It was pretty cool. Everyone was all excited and waving their flags.

Then they rang the bell. The bell ringing was kind of funny because when he rang the bell these pigeons started flying around, it seems they usually sleep on the bell. So the pigeons were totally put out for the night! I’m sure they are glad the festivities are over.

So really Fiestas Patrias is Saturday the 16th but the festivities started more or less last night around midnight (well a little earlier, but you get the picture). Saturday morning there was a parade downtown. We didn’t go to the parade but we did watch some of the parade in Mexico City on TV.

Can't get the photos to post right now, so I'll try again soon!

That’s all for now. We took a walk to a part of our neighborhood we hadn’t seen and came upon these two roaming dogs. One was a shih-tzu-mutt-mix and the other was a pure bred-looking Chihuahua (the mostly black with a little tan kind). They looked like they were super good friends and really cute. Do you know how hard it was not to bring them home? Paul had to pull me across the street… *sigh!*