¡Viva los Spicy Riders!

Here is an excerpt from an email I sent my wife about tonight's activities:

"After an amazing dinner Ana had prepared for us to go on a guided tour of the city by bike. We were supposed to be on bikes for like an hour and the tour guide would stop from time to time and show us around. Well, it was nothing like that. It was thousands of people simply riding in a race around Mérida. Maybe it was more like a leisurely stroll, but it was no guided tour for tourists. We were te only tourists there. They welcomed us before we began and mentioned us on their microphone. The kids and I had come up with a name for our gang of white cyclists: the spicy riders. Shortly after they welcomed us over the megaphone I yelled out "viva los spicy riders!" and all of the kids yelled out a loud "viva!" Jajajajaja! People thought we were insane! So we did it like 10 more times throughout the ride. It drove the kids more and more crazy to the point that they started to yell out all kinds of things with thick Mexican accents! It didn't help our image any that one of the loudest kids in our group was wearing the tackiest, tourish-est, largest, blue sombrero you will ever see accompanied by an American flag t-shirt. Everyone started calling him "el charro" or "fancy cowboy" and he became a star among the crowd of riders. Another student wore a very prominent Chinese rice-picking hat. The crowd loved him too and he was called "el chino"...he was considered to be the leader of the spicy riders. Over the course of the bike ride the spicy riders got more and more daring and less and less censored in their actions. Many attempted bike tricks, had strange and loud conversations with the locals, and yelled out things to some of the many people who had come out of their homes to watch the race. Other cyclists began to ride by the gang of gringos and take pictures. At one point the spicy riders yelled out "gooooooooooooaaaalllll" in order to encourage some of the local youth that played soccer on the cyclists route. By the time all was said and done the bike trip had seemed more like some sort of drunken Tour de France instead of a guided excursion. The spice riders gave out one last "viva!" At the end of the trip and it was over. A large group of the local riders demanded a picture with the spicy riders and we obliged.
Then we walked back to the hotel. Crazy right? Everyone agreed that it was amazing fun and a one of a kind experience."

Here are some links to videos of the ride:

http://youtu.be/BTNfuE9g2n0

http://youtu.be/J9kw2rvBDDg