Tall, blonde, water balloon targets

Carnaval is the weekend before Lent when everybody is supposed to get out all of their sinful desires before they have to give them up for 40 days. This mostly takes the form of trying to kill people with water balloons.

It was the second to last day of Carnaval, the prime day for water ballooning and we had to walk along the Prado, through one of the main balloon assault areas to get down to teach our English class. David and Ali were going to take a taxi as Hannah and I were to walk. Hannah, a tall blonde girl walking down the Prado turned out to be the target they had been waiting for the whole day. It started out with a few balloons lobbed our way which we could dodge. Then there were more, getting harder to dodge. And then finally as a great battle cheer rang out across the street as the rest of them saw us, the unavoidable barrage began. It was a group of 50 to 100 young people that had seen us and declared us the targets. We were easy prey. For the next 30 seconds it was hailing water balloons. I could avoid some of them but not all; there were probably 5 balloons splattering over us or the pavement by us every second. Hannah, being an even more prized target than myself, was hopeless. She had to keep her eyes on the sidewalk to compensate for her lack of depth perception, but I don't think it would have helped much even if she could look up.

Suddenly, as they saw our hopelessness, and inability to defend ourselves at all, they charged. A solid wall of cheering, bloodthirsty high schoolers coming across the road at us. Balloons were unavoidable. I realized we needed an escape; we would be in bad shape after a few more seconds of this. I looked up and saw a stairway (the only escape on our side of the road for the equivalent of several blocks). I grabbed Hannah’s hand and we climbed the steps. A few people continued to chase us up the steps to exhaust their ammunition on us. One of those balloons that Hannah received had an extra little ingredient to add insult to injury. It was full of mud and rocks.

After all was thrown and wet, we were both soaked and Hannah had a thick stripe of mud on her face and back, and a bruise underneath it. We decided it would be too dangerous to walk back down there to the English class. We tried to get taxis but they said that the street was closed off right now (probably because two blonde americans had almost just been killed there), so we started to walk back along the streets above.

However, we found out, our challenges weren't over yet when a couple of kids standing in a doorway pulled balloons out from behind their backs and smiled mischevious smiles, ready to throw. I gave them a competitive smirk and slowly shook my head. It was enough to buy us us 20 feet. We were across the road when one came running at us. He threw the balloon. After the war of balloons we had just survived, this challenge was nothing more than an opportunity. With my backpack on my back and my notebook drying out in my left hand, I caught the balloon with my right and strated to run the kid down. His friends in the doorway were yelling at him to hurry. I was quickly gaining on him. Finally, from only a few paces away, I let loose. The water balloon splattered over the back of his legs. I gave his friends a look that said, "Hope that was as much fun for you guys as it was for me" and turned around to walk away. I heard cheers from across the street. A couple old men were smiling and clapping because they had seen the whole thing.

Finally, after getting a call from David and Ali, we tried again and finally a taxi said that the Prado was now open and he could take us to our English class. All our sweet little kids snickered at us that afternoon, as we stood at the board in all our wet clothes, shivered as we tried to teach of bit of english.