Day of the Dead

I't not as big a deal as Carnaval but it's pretty big ju-ju. MP really wanted to see the costuming and all the art influence for the Day of the Dead celebration where people honor and remember their passed loved ones. So we did our due diligence and reserved a night at the wonderful La Siesta Hotel on the beach in Olas Altas so we wouldn't have to come home  late in the evening, Here's the view from our room for the next two nights...yup , I said two nights, turns out we were off on the main event by one day so whats there to do ? Just wait I guess, what else we got to do.

Everywhere in town are these alters that both commemorate and show the persons interests and outer and inner selves. The alters are tiered to show there ascension to heaven and usually the lower tier will have the wickedness of whiskey or such and the top tier a favorite fruit or juice or pop.  Here's one for the famous Opera Singer Angela Peralta... I never would have figured her for a rounder. One of the things I found interesting is that many of the alters were for long lost loved ones , many generations back, Grieving and love last longer than one lifetime and I guess, I knew that but never really thought about it.

The Venado store had my favorite for Jose Jimenez who must have been a guy like me, an entertainer and musician. They had free beer for us in Jose's honor and later the next day I was to learn what a big part of the traditions free beer is...

So on our ' wrong' night we went and ate at El Tunnel which is the restaurant that started it all for us. The place has more refined than that the El Tunnel of 20 years ago but the food and the service was the same fantastic as always. Sinaloa style tacos which is piled and not folded, mine were potato/cheese and MPeasy had her usual chicken, that girl can eat chicken, We ran into our friend Clara who was drawing at the art school and then we sat on a bench in the Plaza and watched the people and visited with a man and his daughter from Culican who wanted to practice there english. They were in Maz to visit the graves of his parents. 

The next night we sat on the sea wall with hundreds of our new friends to watch the parade. we had every intention to view the parade from street level but about 8:00 the on shore breeze stopped and...did I tell you how hot it is ??? so , as much as I hated to retreat we went upstairs to view from our room patio, kinda cool in two ways...Here's pic of us on the sea wall waiting to report for Mile 14.

Pretty soon all of us see bottle rockets flying and hear music coming from up the malecon and it's upon us. The skeleton head lead the way with dance troupes and a other floats.

Wish my pics had turned out better. Then....the really unusual occurred . We see a truck coming with a hundred or so people surrounding it, I see a projectile or 10 fly into the crowd and realize all the excitement is FREE BEER. They had cooler totes full of Pacifico Light and were giving away hundreds and hundreds of cold ones. People in the crowd would wave and a guy would chuck one too them, man, good thing they didn't have bottles but I'd bet ya a ....beer,,, that more than one person got pole axed by a Pacifico Light that night. I have a great video but I just can't get it to upload....So me and my running partner both say we've never seen anything like that before and Walla...ANOTHER truck comes by the same way ! Then we have some dancers and an old wrecked pirate ship and most likely a politician or two and low and behold....yet a 3rd free beer truck goes by. Yikes, I saw one guy walking along with three cans in his left hand while he power chugged with his right. mmmm, maybe a good thing that we were upstairs. What a place !

I've caught a lot of fish , just no ' consumables ' sense I let that Grouper go to build my karma, But this morning I caught my first Roosterfish of the 2019 /20 season. Oh baby....he hit hard, ran off line and jumped like silver salmon....and weighed every bit of 10 0unces...I'm not exaggerating, He was awful cute just a bit on the svelte side. A fish like this you don't have long enough arms for so don't even try, you'll look ridiculous.

Many, many Loco fish. They're boney and look a bit like a Mullet, They jump and and are hard to land as they have a soft mouth so to catch two at once is a pretty good trick, one on the teaser and one on a lazer minnow. I caught one this morning and my friend Daniel quickly tied on a bare hook and then lip hooked the Loco and let him swim off. I told him that if he catches a fish on a loaner fish he's a first ballot inductee into the Mile 14 Hall of Fame.

See you guys later. Now that we're in Maz I'll write more. And for all of our friends in Alaska we hope the weather breaks and you get to doing some of the winter things Alaskans love.