February 22nd is "Carnival" in Peru.  Unfortunately, unlike Brazilian Carnival, women don't go topless and parade around in the streets, however there is a different kind of fun to be had.

Lucia and I loaded up on 200 water balloons, stood on the roof of her house, and gave a water smackdown to anyone within 150 feet of her house.  Cars, people, dogs, buses; it was great.  This was the advantage of lobbing water balloons and water from the roof of a building, instead of roving around on the street, in one of the water ballon, or paint gangs.  When the gangs would wander by, they were easy game.  They had to either run like pussies to get out of range, or suffer the barrage of water suffering.  Eventually, I got sick of the easy pickings from the roof, and nobly experienced the street danger, first hand.

Lucia and I had previously started a war with the guys and girls across the street.  They had fruitlessly tried to throw balloons high enough to hit us.  Once they actually got a balloon high enough, but it didn't hit it's target.  Lucia refused to roam the street with me, but I couldn't refuse the great opportunity for taunting everyone.  I walked down to the corner market and started to buy a Powerade.  I could see the army was gathering.  There was even a group of water soaked and painted girls that had joined the guys across the street.  The 12 of them started coming for me.  I didn't have time to grab my change for my purchase, but exclaimed I would come back soon.  I ran.  I wasn't really worried about getting wet, but being painted with my nice cashmere sweater on, wasn't going to happen.  I escaped all of them, mainly, by using cars and trucks in the street as obstacles, for which they were not versed in dogging.

I casually walked back to the store where I bought my Powerade, picked up my change, and started strolling back to Lucia's house, only 50 feet away.  I saw some guys from across the street coming toward me with a bucket of water.  I figured I could dodge it at short notice, until I glimpsed another guy coming from across the street, and behind me.  At this point, I knew it was going to be a difficult task to escape.  The water came in, I sprung into action, but my foot slipped.  Not only did I get a fairly direct bucket of water on me, but my foot slipping caused my to fall into the mixture of mud and water laying on the sidewalk.  The paint girls came in for the kill, but even when wet, I had the fortitude and advanced planning to avoid paint on my clothing.  Once soaked, the fun quickly ended.  Invincibly dry Erik, had been gotten.  The day became cloudy and cold and Carnival came to a close . . .

Apparently, there are some big advantages to living in a third world country, and being able to legally throw water balloons and smear paint on people, is one, or two of them.