Palmares Festival
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Palmares,
Costa Rica
Friday, January 19, 2007
There are always big fiestas going on in this country. One week one town is throwing their fiesta, the next week there is another big fiesta in another town. One of the largest fiestas is Palmares. It goes for two weeks long and is in the town of Palmares (the town and the fiesta are called Palmares). Last Thursday was the first day of the festival and is usually the day where the most people attended. It was estimated that a million people were in this small town on that first Thursday. Thats a lot of people and its even crazier to think that there are only 4 million people in this country! So a quarter of the population was there, nuts.
I aced the final, walked down to the chino market (what we call the corner store) with Brett and Chelsea, picked up some booze and Guaro (the Costa Rican liquor) and headed over to the park to hang out before hopping on the bus to Palmares. We left at 3pm and then leave the fiesta at 11pm (really early by their standards).
Pre-boozing on the bus brought us to a nice level before venturing into the crowded streets and fair grounds of Palmares. There is a big parade that is carnival like, with costumes, people dressed up, bands, goofy acts, and whatever else you normally find in the carnival type atmosphere. The streets were overflowing with people. Tons of people walk around with coolers with all their drinks. We found the beer-deal-of-the-century in the fair grounds: three 6% Pilsen beers for 1300 colones (about 2.5 US dollars). We had a group of 23 people that pretty much lost each other within the first 15 minutes. We would bump into people from our group and sometimes other people from the school. Chelsea and I lost ourselves in the crowds of people. We pretty much just wandered around, drank beer, people watched, ate food, and took carnival rides.
By 11pm, we were supposed to leave but people from our group were still missing. By 11:30pm, we were missing my buddy Brett and a girl named Kelsy. They were last seen together really drunk and making out. The bus driver didn't want to wait and we couldn't convince him otherwise, so we left. Brett told me the next day that they were hammered and lost track of time. They thought they missed our bus, so they hopped on a public bus back to San Jose. Turns out it was only 9pm when they left, they had lost track of time so badly that they were two hours early and thought they had missed the bus. I guess thats what lots of Guaro does to you. Great night.
