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New Years Eve arrived with even less fanfare than Christmas, there being no grand meals or decorations to organise. In language classes everywhere teachers used the multiple holidays to have their students talk about holidays in their home lands. They then explained some of the quaint customs of Bolivia.
Customarily Bolivians sit down to dinner with their families for a midnight meal on New Years Eve. When the clock strikes twelve, twelve grapes are eaten and twelve wishes are made. People change their underwear; into a new red pair if you want the year to bring you love, or into a yellow pair if you would prefer wealth. People run up and down stairs (for some indecipherable reason), and count wads of fake cash to bring prosperity in the coming year. Then they take to the streets.
We approached the new year in a restaurant full of families and white couples. When ’09 hit it did so in an empty bar where we were breaking in our new, colourful underwear on the dance floor.
By the time we plunged down into the somewhat notorious Green Pepper the city had come to life, the streets busy with taxis, and the dance floor busy with the young, the pretty, and the inebriated. Prices inflated and breathing space contracted into a heaving, seething mass of new year sweat and smoke.
When we emerged it was light enough to make out the cigarette burns on my arms. It was a cool light though, the light of the year’s first rain, rinsing off the merry-makers as they hailed cabs that scuttled for the Prado, one of the main avenues of town. There in the rain the festivities carried, crowds of people waiting for their first fricasé of the year, rival bands of roving musicians beating out tunes that got the tired masses dancing. Guys with black eyes or dried blood on the mouths dodged through the crowd, but none of them looked tired. Instead they looked for ladies. Elderly cholitas bundled up in their bright blankets asked for money, but few people had any left.
Admission to the fricasé-serving restaurants was on a case by case basis. We waited patient and demure until we were allowed in out of the rain and cacophony. But all the fun was going on outside. Inside there was only stew.
When we cabbed away, heads nodding, the bands were still playing and more and more clothes were being pulled off and whirled around drunken heads. The rain was still falling and it made everything seem all the more festive.
By the time the rain eased the celebrations were over and the city was sleeping off its excesses, and I went looking for grapes to make sure my twelve wishes were properly registered.
In Bolivia as the clocks strike midnight and another new year is ushered in, the tradition is to eat twelve grapes. It’s a common custom in Spanish-speaking countries. In Spain the twelve grapes correspond to the twelve chimes of the clock. In Bolivia, though, the twelve grapes represent the twelve months of the coming year, and are each accompanied by a wish.
Here are my twelve grapes for ‘09…
January. As I leave Cochabamba and move to Sucre I wish for an apartment with hot water, another great and inexpensive Spanish teacher, and volunteer work that I actually enjoy and which is worth doing.
February. I hope hope hope that after my first 90 days in Bolivia expire, I will be allowed to stay for another 90.
March. I wish for peace and stability in Bolivia, and that there will no more talk of secessions or civil wars or other sillinesses. But if there is a split I wish to be the very first gringo to visit the new country. And I wish for them to erect a statue to me.
April. I wish for Spanish fluency so that I can read all the hilarious birthday cards that Bolivia is going to give me.
May. I wish for sufficient time and money to see every corner of Bolivia before I leave it behind, and I hope that I become such an expert in all things Bolivian that someone will pay me to share my wealth of knowledge (I’d rather it was Lonely Planet or similar than, say, the CIA).
June. I hope that by the time Bolivia has depleted my savings I will have found work elsewhere in the New World (such as in Buenos Aires).
July. I wish for a safe flight back to Australia for my cuz’s wedding, and that while I am in Australia I am offered lots of cash in exchange for the right to publish my book. Also I hope that all my Australian friends remember me and want to hang out.
August. I wish that when I return to South America there will be far less reggaeton played in it.
September. I wish that my second book would take much less time to write than the first, which will have been made into a movie. Or a series of movies. And my protagonist will have become an action figure.
October. I hope that if I am living in Buenos Aires that I become very good at tango. If I am living in Colombia I hope I am not dead or kidnapped. If I am still in Bolivia I hope I am not incarcerated, or a father.
November. I hope that after I have spent a year in South America I have influenced it such that vegetarian food no longer means just potatoes, egg and rice.
December. I wish for a hot Australian Christmas, and for the means to fly home, thus beginning to rectify for mum the recent disparity between Christmases spent at home and those spent abroad.
