Two Fiestas

Sunday was a busy day, with two parties in town.

The first was the Fiesta de San Francisco. The Iglesia San Francisco is the second biggest church in town, and October 12 is it's birthday. So even though we're just a week after the birthday of San Miguel, we still have to have a party. At noon, there was a parade (or "procession" as they like to call religious parades here), with more floats, music and dancers. Some of the Aztec indian dancers returned from last week, but there were a few new features as well. One was the Chinela (I think that's what they were called) dancers, which has cool outfits and masks. Here's what they looked like:


Chinela dancers

We hung out in town for a while to enjoy the spectacle, but then had to do some shopping and return home for the second fiesta - an open house at our home. We invited five families, and everyone showed up, so we had ten adults and twelve kids in all. My formula for a successful party is to set it up so that the hostess has a good time, so we hired Rocio for the day to do all the cooking and help out during the party. And cook she did! We had enchiladas mole, enchiladas suiza, fruit salad, green salad, taquitos, two kinds of beans and arroz verde (green rice). Plus Margarita made a ton of salsa and guacamole yesterday. Bryce helped cook, and Sue got in there as well:


Cooking for the party

Everyone enjoyed the food, the company, and the view from the house. We bought bubbles and rocket balloons for the kids, and they had plenty of fun as well. After a couple of hours, we took a walk in the neighboring El Charco del Ingenio nature preserve, which most of our guests have never seen before. About half-way through, it started raining, but since there was nowhere to take shelter, we all just enjoyed the getting really wet. I had towels for everyone upon returning, and most of us had more food, since rain apparently makes you hungry.

After our guests left, the second half of the San Francisco Fiesta took place, with fireworks and a castillo in town, which we enjoyed from the deck. It was a great way to end an awesome day.