La Quinceañera

I went to a quinceañera on Saturday night. Quinceañeras is like the Spanish equivalent of a Sweet Sixteen birthday party, except for 15 year olds. Boys don’t really have them, and the girls use them as an excuse to dress up and dance with all of their friends. This was my first one in Baoba (birthday parties are extremely rare because the families here don’t have enough money to spend it frivolously on a party), so I was excited to attend.

Yaritza, the birthday girl, told us the party was to start at 4 in the afternoon. This was a little depressing because I teach my English class at 5 so I gave her my regrets and told her that I couldn’t make it. Yamel and Elizabeth (two girls, who were also invited to the party, yet were in my English class) and I stopped by Yaritza’s house at 4:15 on the way to the English class. Yaritza, decked out in a full-length gown, was getting her hair and makeup done by a friend and the rest of the family was busy putting up pink and white balloons all over the house. We wished Yaritza good luck and then went to class.

After the English class, at 6:30 pm, we passed by Yaritza’s house. The party still hadn’t started! So we decided to stick around and wait to celebrate the quinceañera. It was dark outside, and there was no electricity this night, but the Yaritza’s family had borrowed a generator. About 15 kids had gathered at the house, all eager to dance and eat cake, but the generator wouldn’t start. So everyone just sat there complaining about the fact that there was no music for at least 30 minutes. Then I kicked into volunteer/party host and announced that we should play a game while we waited for either the generator to work or the lights to come back on.

I had no idea what game we could all play, but luckily they had already planned one. The game was kind of like a sexier version of high school superlatives. There were two bags (one for the boys and one for the girls) full of various characteristics like “prettiest smile” or “smartest.” A boy and a girl had to each pull out a characteristic from the bag and then kiss (preferably on the cheek since I was playing as well) a member of the opposite sex that fit that particular description. I won for “best hair” (I was the only blonde), “best eyes” (they were the only blue ones), “person who likes to be alone the most” and “person who dresses the most old-fashioned.” I also voluntarily won for “ugliest” because I simply couldn’t believe that someone was going to get called out for that, so I quickly told the boys to choose me for that one.

After the game, which lasted about an hour, they lights still hadn’t come back on. So we all gathered around the candles to eat a snack of two saltine crackers, a glass of soda and a lollipop per person (that’s a little different than the food at our American birthday parties, right??) There was also a cake, but the custom generally is to cut the cake the next day and pass it out to everyone who came to the party. I happened to get gypped and Yaritza never brought me cake, which to be honest, made me a little upset.

By this time, the boys had figured out how to make the generator work, so we cranked up the reggaeton music and everyone danced until about 9:30 p.m., and then everyone left.