Edit:  The video will have to wait a few more days.  Vimeo has a 500 MB upload limit per week.  Tick tik

Noisy bastards vid…

Yesterday was Black Friday, otherwise known as “the Friday before Thanksgiving in the states”, which has since morphed into this heavily promoted gargantuan consumer feeding frenzy, as a result of corporate influence world wide.  We didn’t even have that scourge in Canada until three years ago.

Now, we’re bombarded with weeks of advertising prior to it, and you can just bet that Zerohedge has some videos today of people getting trampled at Walmart or something.  Here, they’ve been mentioning it on the TV since we arrived in Panama City five weeks ago, has been strengthening all along, and reached full on saturation yesterday.

It’s sort of sickening watching people being herded like goats to the mall, and coverage was at least 40% of the local news.  Because I still don’t understand all that is said on TV, I notice the pictures more, the “action” shots of guys with loaded up carts rolling past, short interviews with “Spanish word for shopper” “doing the right thing supporting my country”, and it was sooooooo obvious.

All this while we ate dinner and watched a parade gather outside the door.   ??

For those that could tear themselves away, there was a Parade yesterday of all the firefighters in the area.  They are called “Bomberos” here, and there were about a thousand?  Dunno.  We didn’t have a camera, and weren’t expecting it in the first place.  We just wanted to go to a specific restaurant for dinner, and it happened to be right across the street from the firehouse where they began gathering.

After dinner, which was excellent, we stepped out into it.  All but the band had Tiki Torches, lit up in succession as they got ready to go, first a few at the front, then as they noticed and lit their own, we realized just how many there were!  The whole place smelled of kerosene.  I leaned over to Cass and said “hope there isn’t a fire anywhere”.

The sound, ohhh, the sound!!! Cass has never been that close to a marching band before.  It fills you completely, and when I looked over at her she was covered in goose bumps and her eyes were welling up a bit.  After this past months’ trials and challenges, she finally got to experience one of the spontaneous things that “just happen” down here out of the blue.

The parade marched on and turned a corner, so we were able to walk around the block and catch it again as it went by.  Well, almost made it, so when Cass broke off into a little trot to catch up to it, it was such a giggle.

We did manage to make it to our room, get the camera, loop back around for another pass, and this time get the whole thing on on video.  It will take a while to upload, but I’ll try to get it up today.

Today is a national holiday celebrating Colombian independence from Spain.  Don’t ask me why they would celebrate that.  I don’t know enough about the history down here,  but ignorance is what makes these things seem spontaneous.  The celebrations continue today, I’m told.

I learned a lot about tires this morning, what the red and yellow dots on the sidewalls actually mean, and how they are supposed to be used when positioning new tires on rims.  Here’s a link to a forum post if you’re interested, and another here. 

If used correctly by the installer, it creates a good starting point for balancing tires, resulting in less overall weight required.  If you see your new tires NOT aligned as they should be, it also tells you whether your “tire shop” knows what the heck they are doing.

Knowledge is power, and another hat tip to Mark for mentioning it to me in the first place.  I didn’t even know they were there before he said something about it.