While eating breakfast with three men from London (Mike, Michael and Peter), we heard fireworks. This isn't unusual here in Antigua because they love to set off fireworks in the city, which makes for a lot of noise and sometimes a beautiful night sky. However, within minutes we realized that something was wrong because the fireworks were going wild and there was a lot of smoke from where the fireworks were going off. We ran to see what was going on and discovered that the 45 Tiendas (shops) were all on fire. Each one of the shops had fireworks for sale. This photo is what was left of the shops when we arrived. It shows the fire, the people watching and so forth. Yesterday I walked by the same area and discovered that all of the tiendas were back and selling fireworks, even though they weren't in a nice building, but rather make shift store fronts of tin and wood. It was funny because they rebuilt in such a hurry that there was still debris from the fire in the center.
