Reveillon 20009 Praia da Rosa

This is me on new years with my new best friends Carlos and Decio (their girlfriends are missing from the pic), with whom I spent a week in Praia da Rosa, Santa Catarina state. Before coming to Brazil, my Brazilian friend Cynthia, who now lives in San Francisco, prepped me for a Brazilian New Year's celebration:

" You need to throw flowers to Yemanjá. She is a vain goddess, and people in Brazil might throw perfumes and soap in the Atlantic ocean, but roses should be just fine. You should also dress in white and buy new underwear. Choose a color to activate whatever you want in 2009, red for passion, pink for love, green for health, yellow for money or blue for peace. Then you dance at least for the first five hours of the year. The whole country will be doing it. It will be your best new year's ever!! "

Some good advice! Thanks to Cynthia I brought my white Marilyn-Monroe-inspired halter dress and wore lots of gold and shiny accesories (not a stretch for me.) I didn't get the new underwear and I forgot about the flowers, but around 11:30 me and the whole galera (gang, sounds like 'peanut gallery', doesn't it? I love it.) made the pilgrimage to the beach. Everyone was dressed in white, which I know should be festive, but to me it reminded me of what I've heard about the Mormon Church, and so to be honest it kinda freaked me, like I had died or was taking part in a big baptism or something. But these chicks don't look like their going to church:

So once we got to the beach it was packed, we couldn't move, and we were getting soaked by falling Vodka-Red-Bulls and whatever other drinks people were throwing up into the air. Pretty soon, I noticed my feet were wet, and I looked down and realized that we had reached the ocean -- but there were so many people we couldnt even see it!

After this we went back to the poussada, or pension, where we were staying to put our drinks back and get ready for the party! We went to the club we had been to all 5 nights we were there, Mar del Rosa, and listened to some pretty awesome DJs. There was even a duo who sang in real life -- awesome: