i love a parade ...

oh dear blog readers, it's been such a long time since we've seen a good old fashioned south american parade.  it used to be that we were welcomed to town by a parade wherever we went.  well, luckily the other night while we were walking around san telmo looking for a cheap parilla, we stumbled upon this parade of sorts.

so it all started off rather normal with music and dancing and shiny costumes.   good stuff.  then we noticed that there were a large number of precocious children running around spraying each other with what looked like white silly string.  fine.  i'm all for merriment.

soon the bolshevik and i were lost in the crowd and wound up getting split up.  it was around this time that i noticed men selling spray cans of nieve or snow.  what was this stuff?  was it like the fake snow people spray on christmas trees?  well, that's kind of charming then that a culture where no one has even seen snow wants to have a snowy parade.  how cute.

but it all got malicious rather quickly ... apparently the nieve is really just a special type of shaving cream good for spraying at people.  as soon as i entered the crowd i was getting hit everywhere.  at first by punk ass kids, and then later by adults as well!  wtf?!  i was just an innocent bystander!

the bolshevik covered in nieve
moments before spraying me

by the time i found the bolshevik again we were both soaking wet, covered in nieve.  as i approached him, thankful that we could finally leave this crazy parade, the bolshevik shot me!  enraged by what was going on, the bolshevik had bought his own can of nieve for self-defense.

so then we both re-entered the crowd, hoping to get our revenge.  but man, those kids were good.  ultimately, we left the parade having inflicted way less damage than we would've liked.