New Year's Eve - Super Chicken Land

On New Year's Eve, we got all dressed up and went out to Ana's Brother's friend's house to celebrate. On the way there, we stopped at the store to grab some juice for the bottle of vodka that we were bringing. The grocery store that we stopped at was named
Super Frangolândia which translates to, I kid you not, Super Chicken Land.



Needless to say, this amused me to no end, and for the rest of the trip, every time we passed the supermarket, I would shout "Super Chicken Land!" Then Ana would roll her eyes and silently wonder why she ever started going out with me.



When we got to the party, the host and hostess greeted me in English, which instantly made me feel more comfortable. We had champagne at midnight, and all the males had to open a bottle, shaking it up and blasting the cork into the stratosphere. I was told this was necessary, so I was happy to participate. After this, we had to eat seven grapes and keep all the seeds for the whole next year. I'm not a superstitious person, but I like to hedge my bets, so I'm still carrying around a napkin full of seeds in my wallet.

Shortly after all this, we had to play a weird party game where a present is wrapped in layer upon layer upon layer, and each layer has a label, instructing the recipient to do something, then hand the present to an appropriate person, say someone at the party who has helped you in the last year. Then the next person has to unwrap to the next inner layer, rinse, and repeat. At some point, the task was to call up all the people who are going to be married in the next year. This basically turned into anyone who had been going out for more than a week getting called up, so Ana and I took our places on the "stage". The challenge was for each man to make up a poem for his beloved. It had to rhyme, and it had to be a love poem, a fairly tall order on short notice. The first time I was called I begged off for more time and the second time around, I still had nothing good, so I went with something lame which rhymed great with 2008. When they called for applause to rate the entries, I got a tiny smattering of applause thanks mostly to the dual facts that I didn't know 3/4 of the people there, and hardly anyone spoke English. I clearly hadn't won, but they declared me the victor, out of pity I assume. Ana came to help me, we handed it off to a "single person" (Ana's mother) and I was finally off the hook.

After the stressful part of the evening, I relaxed and polished off about 3/4 of a bottle of champagne and got sufficiently inebriated. We watched a recording of a few of the concerts of a very popular band in Brazil, Chiclete com Banana (Gum with Banana) whose outdoor shows in Brazil regularly take in hundreds of thousands. The music is a kind of raggae fusion that's actually quite energizing and addictive.



At around 2am we got tired and left, even though Ana said we were going to be there until 6... I think we're getting weak in our old age. It was a fun night, and a great way to bring in the new year.