From Christmas onward, several of the streets in our “democracia” shopping area were closed down and filled with shopping stalls.

One street was primarily fruit and vegetables…

But the other streets were packed with stalls like this fireworks stall.  The rolls on the right are strings of firecrackers…

But at least this stall has a (tiny) fire extinguisher!

And so the streets were packed with walkways between stalls like this (about 3 or 4 blocks long)…

and

But on New Years morning, we walked up to see what the area looked like and were startled to see a ghost town!  Everyone had packed up sometime in the late afternoon on New Years Eve and gone home!

The street over was deserted – it definitely felt “weird” to me and gave a sense of an apocalypse.