Festival of Lights

My friend Ashley and I decided it´d be fun to go into San José and see the Festival of lights. The parade route was forever long, and everyone--- not even kidding!--- came out to see the show. There were SO many people there, it was just NUTS! So the parade started at 6 pm, or so the signs said. But I once again was reminded of this very ´time insensitve´culture!! My friend Ashley and I found a spot on the route standing behind 3 rows of people. We were talking to eachother in Spanish to practice a little bit. Once we found our spot, this very nice man asked us if we were gringas... haha. We laughed pretty good, because we were even speaking Spanish and he still knew we weren´t from around here!! We talked to the man for about an hour or so, and definately got our practice in of Spanish. We waited and waited for the parade to start. I finally took a seat on the sidewalk cuz I knew it would be longer. Then the man that was talking to us, who had left, came back and invited us to come in the restaurant and sit with him and his friends. So we agreed, the restaurant was right behind us, and had a big open window to watch the parade. We talked with them for a little bit, and by this time, I have to admit, I was getting a little impatient. We didn´t see our first float of the parade until almost 9 PM!!! It was SO crazy! So we watched maybe 5 floats go by with the friends we had just made, but decided we wanted to get out and walk around a little bit. So we walked up the parade route, and decided we were hungry. We saw huge pieces of pizza for a dollar, so we were going to split one. We got our pizza, found a place on a curb to eat it, and boy was it satisfying!! The we walked back up a block to look at the parade, and to much of our surprise, the float that we had seen maybe 10 minutes earlier was just passing by, and we were only 3 blocks down from where we first saw it!! It was such a slow moving parade!! BUT... the floats were very impressive, and they even had a lot of marching bands which are always my favorite!! I got to see Latin American flag girls, very different, but so great!

All in all it was another cultural experience in so many ways!! Oh, and this is a picture of Ashley and me with confeti all over. You could by confeti for 100 colones ... like 20 cents... and everyone went around throwing it at everyone. We for sure got it in our mouths, and eyes. It was really fun cuz it reminded Ashley and me of snow!! The streets were all white!! So pretty!