Happy New Year!

Red (for luck), yellow (for money), with banana or lace? This was the choice of New Year’s Eve pants for sale across Mexico. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide what we went for…

Oaxaca is a wonderful colonial Mexican city that smells of chocolate and burnt meat. On New Year‘s Eve the zocalo (central plaza) was decked out in fairy lights and beds of poinsettias and was abuzz with families sipping soft drinks (drinking alcohol in the street is prohibido) and buying balloons. The city’s many elaborate Catholic churches were packed full of incense and people reflecting on the year past and present.

Pants are just part of the Oaxacan New Year’s Eve celebrations. You also need to drink cider - not a problem - and eat a grape for each of the chimes at midnight, making a wish with each. Sadly we left ours in the fridge. However, as there was no Big Ben there were no chimes to welcome in 2009, so we wouldn’t have known when to eat them anyway. Instead we waited until the amateur pyrotechnics reached a peak and then surreptitiously chinked and slugged our warm lagers. We know how to celebrate in style!

The rest of the midnight hour was spent trying to dodge the mini-rockets and jumbo sparklers that ricocheted around the zocalo, and keep out of the way of the foam spray and eggs that were being lavishly spread over party goers. It seems to be a tradition to break eggs full of flour and/or hole-punch clippings on people’s heads.

It’s been quite a year for World In Slow Motion. We’ve travelled over 30,000 miles across three continents and sixteen countries. We’ve slept in the wilds of Siberia, worked amongst bears in Japan, eaten our body weight in rice, drunk ‘proper’ tequila, travelled on some of the best and worst trains in the world and got engaged on a cargo ship. With only three more countries to go, we’ll see what adventures 2009 brings…Happy New Year!