Happy F*?king New Year

This is my first new year in Peru and to be honest I could have done without being here. The evening dinner had been extended from about 7.00pm up to about 10.00pm and then most folks just sat and waited for the entertainment to happen. the karaoke was fired up and the compare who was a very good singer sang about 4 songs without the words and when it came to start the machine with words it lost the ability to make music, lots of button pressing and wire tugging ensued but to no avail it was dead with the words so I couldn't even attempt to sing any of the beetles songs, as that is all they had in English. So after that the compare became the entertainer and was singing merrily away and the only 5 women in the canteen were dragged up unceremoniously by the guys one after another to dance and were sweating nicely after 15 minutes and at the same time one member of staff was handing out the party hats and streamers and whistles and rattles very slowly and once all the streamers had been thrown the atmosphere had lightened a little and while everyone was blowing the whistle they did the countdown and as we all cheered there was a procession of all the folks moving about the room shaking hands and giving a hug to everyone, the women seemed to be the most popular, the guys were very careful to hold themselves at a angle to avoid groinal contact, and then they all left the room to burn an effigy of a protestant probably, something to be opposite the english version of burning an effigy of a catholic on the 5th of November, that one is the remembering of the execution of a catholic who attempted to assassinate parliament in England about 400 years ago. Anyhow the guy appointed to burn the said effigy was using a rolled up piece of paper and we all know rolled paper has virtually no surface area to get air to the burning paper surface and it was a horrible sight to see him trying to get any reasonable flames going but just as it lit up some idiot threw some olive oil on it in the hope of raising the flames but it did just the opposite nad put out the flames, he again tried lighting the paper on the ground and the oil moron again threw oil on it to hopefully get a boost of flame, this was being watched by 500 people and it was pathetic, I went back into the canteen and with my feet scraped all the loose streamers up into a huge ball and carried them back outside and hung them on the huge fake penis they had created for the protestant effigy ( quite lifelike actually ) and once the mini flames hit the streamers there was a huge fireball that rushed up the effigy and it was fully alight within 20 seconds and everyone cheered. I felt like a fireman to the rescue but working the wrong way round. The effigy collapsed after 2 minutes as it was just a pair of coveralls with paper stuffed inside and everyone left for bed I presume as they had all disappeared, I made the joke to my engineering colleagues that it had to be a turbine engineer to get a good light off. We spoke for about another 5 minutes and then all went to bed. So that was it, we threw some streamers shook hands and hugged and then burnt an effigy. Great wasn’t it, I can think of better things to do for next year, we’ll see.