Blammo!

Many apologies for our blogging slackerness lately. We´re still recovering from an epic weekend (full details and photos tomorrow) and we promise that this, our last week in Oaxaca before hitting the road again, will be chock full o´bloggy goodness. For now, here's a little tidbit of life down here: Mexicans love blowing things up. Any minor celebration is an excuse to light firecrackers and M80s and let them explode through the night. Sunday afternoon we ran into a parade that was apparently a local neighborhood deciding to get together, play trumpets and dance with huge papier mache puppets, and celebrate their awesome neighborhoodliness by making things go boom, causing us to flinch repeatedly and get 'Nam flashbacks. Then, Sunday night, the Mexican Under-17 soccer team won the Youth World Cup (stomping Brazil 3-0), which led to everyone spontaneously running through the streets, shirtless men draping themselves in the flag and jumping up and down in pickup trucks and, yes, intensely loud fireworks filling the sky until sunrise. This needs to happen in America: next time some podunk Little League team from Kansas manages to beat Taiwan in the World Series, I'm getting naked and setting off cherry bombs.

--rahul