Grande fiesta!

We heard about the annual Christmas parade held on the day after Christmas. It was supposed to be a big deal.

I started asking around about it. I heard the usual stories about how the parade was always late and normally didn't start until 9 pm.

We shuffled into town at 6 pm for dinner with some friends. At about 7:30 pm we started walking up into town.

Wow! I have never seen this many people in the village. Most of the streets were blocked off. Full of people. Packed with people.

We got a perspective of how many people Boquete serves. The village is small...5 square blocks at the most. But, there are 15,000 people living in the area.

They were ALL out last night, plus some from David down the road 35 miles. I estimate that 20 to 30 thousand people were at the parade.

Most of the crowd were families with little drinking apparent. This is not the normal Saturday night...it gets very drunk out on Saturday night...but not at the parade.

It started about 8:30 pm. We walked up the parade to the start and saw all the "floats" in 30 minutes. If we had waited in place, I have no idea how long it would of taken but it would have been tedious. As in any small town, the floats were "charming" meaning pretty minimal but the spirit was there.

On our way home, we passed a community center about 1 mile from our house. There was a big party in full swing...this one was getting plenty drunk.

At our house, we could hear the music (remember, a mile away from the party) with the windows closed. It went till past 3 am.

In the morning, we drove past the party on the way to breakfast and there were still people partying.

You got to give it to them. They know how to party here.