Eat, DRINK, and Be Merry…..

I spent this past weekend at the annual Fiesta, down in St. Bernard.  To briefly explain, this Fiesta is put on every year by the Canary Islanders heritage group down there, and since I am the current President of the same type of group in Baton Rouge, it makes sense that I would be there.

The biggest highlight of this event is the entertainment.  Each year, the organizers of the Fiesta bring in a group of traditional musicians from the islands to perform.  This year, the group consisted of 12 men, of varying ages who sang and played string instruments.

Despite my lack of Spanish, I was able to meet these guys and spend some time with them over the two days of the Fiesta.  If there is one thing that I have learned about these people, it is that they know how to drink.

On Saturday, I arrived at about 11AM and met the group.  They were all sitting around a white folding table littered with cans of Coke, a nearly empty bottle of dark rum in the center.  I took a closer look at the bottle to see the label, and discovered that it was honey rum made in the Canary Islands that these guys had brought with them.

After they were done with their performance for the day, I saw one of the guys walking back toward the table with a large cardboard box.  Turns out they brought a case of 12 bottles of various rums with them from home.  I didn’t really get a close look at it, but it appeared to be mostly filled with unopened bottles.

Sunday, the guys weren’t performing until later in the afternoon, so they did not show up on site until about 1:30PM.  As they were settling down at the table, I noticed one of them had a large bottle of Bacardi Select rum.  I asked my Spanish friend Sergio, “Why do they have that? I thought they had brought a case of rum with them from home?”  That is all gone, he said.  Apparently by this point, it had all been consumed.  Needless to say, I was shocked by this level of consumption.  I had to ask Sergio again.  “It’s only twelve guys, right?  They drank all that rum?”

No, he said, only ten of the twelve drink.  Whoa.  Sergio didn’t seem to be too amazed by this achievement.  Since he is a native of the same island as the group, I suppose he is used to this level of consumption.

When 3PM came around, and it was time for these guys to perform, they were feeling NO pain.  Sergio went up on the stage to serve as a translator explaining what the lyrics to the various songs meant, since the majority of the crowd were not fluent in Spanish.  After one of the songs, Sergio seemed nervous as he explained that the group was changing some of the lyrics to the songs, but he would do his best to keep up with the translations.

After they left the stage, Sergio appeared as if he had just been through a tornado.  He shook his head in defeat as he approached me.  “They were changing the lyrics, and they said some things that were very suggestive”, he told me.  One lady from Bolivia who was standing next to me was asked by an old man what one of the songs was about and all she could do was mumble, “It is very dirty.”

It took a couple of hours and several shots of the aforementioned Bacardi Select before I could convince Sergio to tell me what they were saying during their performance.  Apparently one of the guys sang something about ‘sticking his branch in the fuzzy bush.”

Anyway, by 4:30PM, that gallon of Bacardi Select was dry, and someone had been dispatched to retrieve more.  At 6PM, just as I was leaving, 4 more bottles of Bacardi Gold had magically appeared.  So, I can only imagine how the rest of the night went.